There are more questions in this month’s issue than answers. On the cover we ask a big one: what price SAARF? How much is the industry willing to pay for the common currency research that has faithfully served it for close on 30 years, making it the envy of the world? It’s a question that first arose late last year, when print media announced their intention to drop payment of the MIT levy by twenty percent from 2003. That call then gave rise to a real corker: whose money is it? If, as the marketers claim, the money that funds the research belongs to them, what gives print media the right to implement such a sweeping decision?
A task team has been furiously working on these problems for around six months now. The team members don’t have ’em yet, so we can’t give you the final solutions but we can explain the issues and tell you how far they’ve come.
The next question is as tough. We kick off with the first in our four-part series on black media, which poses the dilemma of pigeonholing the majority. “Who’s black, anyway?” asks Jyoti Mistry on page 16. Her insightful piece is a necessary foreword to Graeme Addison’s thought-provoking feature on emerging populism in the black press.
Finally, we ask why Zimbabwe has witnessed a veritable flood of fresh newspaper titles since the country’s dollar crashed in 1997. This one’s a bit easier, ‘cos we have former editor of the Zimbabwe Mirror Wallace Chuma helping out.
PS From next month Donald Paul will be contributing a regular column as The Media’s Cape Town correspondent. Formerly editor of SACitylife, Donald has lived and worked in the UK, Sudan, Greece and the US, and has published and edited a literary magazine called the San Francisco Review of Books (for which he interviewed Leonard Cohen and Isabel Allende, amongst others).