By David Jenkin

With 23 years of experience at Netwerk24, Brits has covered some fascinating stories* in a range of scientific fields, and has authored two non-fiction books. Palaeontology, in particular, is a huge passion of hers, she says. So when the opportunity arose to report on one of the greatest scientific discoveries to happen in South Africa, a new species of hominin, she went all out.

An important factor in her success was the time she was given to prepare the story, she says. The University of Witwatersrand shared the embargoed material with only a handful of accredited journalists a few days ahead of the public announcement made by Professor Lee Berger on 10 September 2015. They were also given the chance to visit the cave and the vault where the fossils were kept in order to write a comprehensive story.

“It’s not one story,” she says, “but a package containing videos, photos, short facts, tweets, an interactive graphic and an in-depth-article.” She followed that up, the day after the announcement, with a second angle main story for the front pages of Die Burger, Beeld, and Volksblad with photos and a graphic supplied by Graphics24. “It was a good marriage between online and print, where both received the best of the story.”

An enormous challenge she faced was translating everything, including scientific language, into the correct Afrikaans. Copying and pasting was not an option, she says. This was coupled with an internet signal too weak to even use a dictionary. Nonetheless, after three more days of hard work, it was ready.

“The online package went live the moment Prof. Berger started talking at Maropeng. That was the secret, so readers could immediately have not only breaking news, but in-depth coverage. It did really well,” she says. “Homo naledi suited this 100%. It is a visual story, human interest story and it had so many angles to cover. Multi-platform was the best way to tell it. It is visual, one wants to show how it happened, what was found, and tell a story. One can literally take the reader to the cave.”

She continues: “Our biggest challenge was to build all this in time - I was sitting in a hotel room with the worst Wi-Fi on the planet and had to send everything via email to the team in Cape Town and Johannesburg. We did everything via email, late at night. And it is a technical story, not easy to write. I also had other appointments during these three days, so I had to work on the package at night.”

Creating the full package wasn’t easy, she says, and required a lot of time and dedication from many different people. “We are lucky to have an excellent team who can make graphics and interactive graphics. But it is not easy to do.” In total, they had four days to work on this story, time which is a luxury in journalism, she concludes.

For more information, visit www.netwerk24.com. Alternatively, connect with her on Twitter.

*Other stories Brits has worked on include the Square Kilometre Array, which she has covered over the past ten years as the story has unfolded, and the discovery of Australopithecus sediba in 2008.