Raymond Joseph began his career in journalism as a cadet reporter at the anti-apartheid Rand Daily Mail in 1974. Since then he has worked for mainstream, community and tabloids newspapers, and for magazines, in senior editorial positions, including as news editor, a head of bureaux and London correspondent for Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest circulating newspaper. He has also news edited several different newspapers.
Joseph has extensive journalism training in South Africa and other parts of Africa. He is a former ICFJ/Knight International Journalism Fellow and is also a former editor and board member of The Big Issue South Africa street magazine, which he helped launch in 1996.
Over the decades, beginning in the early 70s in the era of hot metal and then making the transition to cold type, Joseph has witnessed many changes in journalism. Over the years he has regularly reinvented himself as a journalist including making the transition to multimedia and data-driven storytelling, and social media journalism. After launching and heading up Code for South Africa’s (now OpenUp) media programme and its Data Journalism Academy for two years, he has worked as a freelance journalist, fact-checker and journalism since 2017. As a journalist, Joseph works across platforms, on hard news reporting and on data-driven investigative journalism projects.
His most recent data-driven investigative project, which is ongoing, is as head of the South African leg of Gaming the Lottery, a transnational investigation into lotteries around the world.
Joseph also trains journalists, newsrooms and ordinary people in fact-checking and verification of online and social media content, as well as working as a freelance assessor for the Poynter Institute-based. He has done extensive fact-checking training for AfricaCheck and has produced a series of guides for the organisation like this, this and this. Joseph also works as a freelance assessor for the International Fact-Checking Network.
He also trains general news, beat and investigative journalists how to use social media and free tools for investigative journalism to help deepen their research and reporting.