IVOH Thought Leader: Ryland Fisher

Ryland Fisheris a consulting editor for The New Age, a new South African daily newspaper that was launched in December 2010.

He is a former Editor of the Cape Times and has about 30 years of experience in the media industry. He served several newspapers in senior positions, among them South Africa's biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times, where he was assistant editor.

He is the author of Race (published 2007), a book dealing with some of the issues related to race and racism in post-apartheid South Africa. This is his second book, with the first one, Making the Media Work for You (2002), providing insights into the media industry in South Africa. He is currently working on a book on South African identity.

Fisher is the Executive Chairman of the Cape Town Festival, which he initiated while editor of the Cape Times.

He runs a consultancy, called Ryland Fisher Communications, with the mission of "bringing people together". RFC specialises in media consulting and race and diversity training. He has addressed issues of race and racism with several South African government departments, corporate and non-governmental organisations. He has lectured on race in several American cities, and recently in Switzerland.

He writes for several local and foreign publications. He blogs on the book.co.za and the Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader websites.

In 2008, Fisher acted as a consultant for Global Media Alliance, a media company in Ghana (he helped to turn around a Sunday newspaper), and he is the consulting editor of a book on Nelson Mandela that was published in February 2009.

Fisher is the former CEO of Sekunjalo Media Holdings (Pty) Ltd, a division of Sekunjalo Investments Limited (SIL), South Africa's most empowered company in 2006. He is also a former Head of Journalism at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He lectures in investigative journalism at the University of Cape Town and teaches several courses at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg.

He has traveled extensively abroad including for a stint as a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, from August to December 2003. He spent five weeks at the Harvard Business School in 1997 where he underwent a course in change leadership and he attended a five-week journalism course at the University of Missouri in 1993.

In April 2007, he presented two lectures on race and racism in post-apartheid South Africa at the Athens and Zanesville campuses of Ohio University. He also presented lectures in the journalism and African Studies Departments at Ohio University.

In October 2006, he was awarded the Award of Appreciation for Print Media (for Media that
Transforms the Public Space) at the Images & Voices and Hope conference in New York, in recognition of the "One City, Many Cultures" project which he initiated at the Cape Times.

Fisher serves as a director of the Cape Town Community Housing Company (Pty) Ltd and the Shelley Point Hotel and Lodge. He is also a trustee of the St Patrick's Trust, formed to promote entrepreneurship in South Africa.

He was also recently a special adviser to South Africa's Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development.

Fisher is married to Ibtisaan and they have three daughters: Nadia, Raisa and Larah.

Ryland has written the essay, The Value of Independence as part of the IVOH Voices & Values of Journalism Project - listen to and read the entire collection of essays here.