After its “annus horribilis” last year, what South African journalism could do with now is some colonic irrigation. Instead of splashing ourselves with the cheap scent of the self-congratulatory annual Mondi awards (where you only have a chance of winning if you are anal enough to enter your own work) we should be embarking on a period of self-examination and sluicing out the crap to make way for real talent.
If I have discovered one thing in my ten years on the fringes of journalism it is that not only is mediocrity tolerated, it is positively encouraged by many publications because they believe it keeps costs down. There are notable exceptions of course and the Mail & Guardian springs to mind. Here is a newspaper so brimming with fine journalism and superbly crafted columns that it makes Friday a day worth looking forward to. I have little interest in sport and rarely read the back pages of a newspaper, but Tom Eaton’s weekly “Pitch and Mutter” column is now the first thing I turn to. I read Tom Eaton because of the superb quality of his writing, just as I read John Matshikiza and Robert Kirby every week, and I am rarely disappointed. Like many other readers, I savour their words because they have evidently put time, thought and effort into their work and not simply taken down a Bill Bryson book from the shelf or copied and pasted from the internet.
What I don’t buy the Mail & Guardian for is the news content. With the possible exception of the specialist business publications, I imagine very few people buy a newspaper for news these days. We can all hear bulletins on the half hour on any number of radio stations and watch scrolling news on a choice of television stations, so why would we buy a paper tomorrow to find out what happened today?
Where does that leave newspapers? Well, obviously a newspaper is bound to carry a printed version of what we already know and every once in a while a paper will break news, as the Sunday Times investigative team have frequently demonstrated. But what most people want from their newspaper is quality reportage that fleshes out a news story, credible in-depth comment and analysis, intelligent exchanges in the letters pages and, after that, plenty of well written articles that will entertain or amuse them. What they often get is news stories lifted word for word from the news wires, uninformed comment (experts cost money) and banal communications from women called Candida Pax on the letters page. As for some of the articles and columns…well, you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
I sometimes wonder whether the proprietors of newspapers and magazines (apart from the Mail & Guardian that is) would know good writing if it bit them on the tips of their noses. How else does one explain the vast quantity of dross that appears in South African newspapers and magazines? The view of management seems to be that the space between the adverts should be filled as cheaply as possible. The belief is that the reader is too stupid to know any better and, providing you don’t sell him a paper with empty white space between the ads, he will be happy. A mocking disregard for the needs of the customer has caused many a promising business to fail and there is no reason publishing should be any different. ThisDay, the new kid on the block, has quickly established itself as a serious quality daily and circulation is rising. Like the Mail & Guardian, ThisDay evidently believes in attracting top talent because, in the long term, they know that good writing sells the product.