Apparently my helpful suggestions in earlier editions of The Media that journalists be properly incentivised went down like a kwaito act at a Boeremag get together. Not that anyone from management has actually tackled me on the finer points of the argument; they just scowl at me when we pass on the escalator. I hear reports that the gods regard my ideas as unsound and inapplicable to the world of newspapers; something to do with keeping journos in their place and not giving them ideas above their noble calling. So I am afraid I shall just have to keep hammering the point home on these pages.
Admittedly I have had plenty of tacit support from fellow scribes, but most of them are wage slaves who can’t afford to rock the corporate boat because they have families to feed and children to educate. I am in a somewhat happier position, having migrated to the semi retirement of journalism after a profitable decade or two spent in the financial markets. And, as someone once remarked, “what’s the point of having fuck you money if you don’t say fuck you every once in a while?” My sentiments exactly, although I would prefer some intelligent debate on the merits of
running newspapers and magazines as a business venture.
Any fool can cut costs; all you do is sack a few staff and make the rest work twice as hard. Real business acumen is investing smartly today to produce future profits. If mining houses hadn’t spent a fortune prospecting and working out how to dig out gold from two kilometres below the earth’s surface there would never have been a city of gold. Surely it can’t be that difficult a concept to grasp. If you want to make money you first have to spend money, so the oft repeated industry cry of “no budget” simply doesn’t make sense to me. Unless, of course, it is to protect management’s share options.
One of the main problems in the South African magazine market is overcrowding. Fact is, there are simply too many magazines and too few readers and the obvious solution would be to cull some of the less profitable titles, or merge them with other magazines. Personally I don’t believe some magazines even deserve shelf space, but that’s the price of the free market for you. Every publication, no matter how awful, is entitled to jostle for its place on the shelf. That’s partly why the freelance writing rate has remained unchanged for fifteen years. The scarce advertising cake has to be split between deserving and undeserving publications and the only way editors can control costs is to use freelance writers and continue to pay them badly.
Women’s magazines are amongst the worst offenders and you only need glance at the vacuous covers and some of the ‘stories’ to see that the majority are nothing but product puffery masquerading as consumer journalism. It would be fascinating to sit in on an editorial meeting and discover how they all manage to come up with such drivel each month. It might also provide an insight into the apparent cabal of women’s magazine editors who decide which flawless face should be on the cover of their magazines. It seems that, if it’s Helen Hunt month for example, she gets to appear on the cover of every South African woman’s magazine with the result that it’s almost impossible to distinguish one women’s mag from another. They would do the industry a huge favour if half of them disappeared, because the increased advertising revenue could then be put towards producing a more cerebral offering and hiring people who can actually write.