Today's topic starter: Decent property journalism? Does it exist?
Update: Here's a comment I'd like to highlight:
When I was freelancing and trying to break into “real” journalism I suggested pieces on SA’s property bubble to several editors – partly inspired by the things I was reading on this blog. I quickly learned that was the best way to ensure they stopped replying to your emails.
15 comments:
CT Bubble, there's your answer: not a single post, despite this blog being haunted by people with a mild obsession with property.
The reality is that South Africa has one of the most illiterate middle classes on the planet. In South Africa a fiction best-seller is one that sells 5,000 copies. That's fiction: the entertaining stuff people read for fun. Most new titles (fiction and non-fiction) sell between 2,000 and 4,000. Oh, except when a trained lobotomised monkey who used to be a Springbok or a Protea has his biography ghostwritten - then it breaks publishing records, because THAT'S the sh*t we apparently want to read.
This deep antipathy towards reading extends to all written words, including the media. We grudgingly read the news (as long as it confirms our prejudices about The Crime or The State of the Country) but for the rest we just don't like moving our eyeballs across pages.
The result is our utterly dire journalism: no readers means no money which means no competition amongst the brightest and best journalists. Bright young minds that would become great investigative reporters in the US or Europe instead go into PR, Marketing, or any of the other brain-sucking industries we are so fond of in this place.
What's left are hacks. As an ex-journo I know them well, and I know they're still sitting in the newsroom, right now, waiting for SAPA or Reuters to send through the latest "news" (carefully censored by the super-editors at Goldman-Sachs, the Fed, Luthuli House or any of the other companies that produce so much of the "news"). The hacks then shuffle a few paragraphs, add a few punctuation errors, and file it as copy.
It is absolutely standard industry practice for "journalists" to put their names on Pam Golding press releases and publish them unchanged.
So to answer your question: yes, there are a few great financial reporters, working at magazines and being read by 9 people. No, they do not write about property. When it comes to the biggest financial decision of our lives, getting into debt for 20 years, we have no-one to guide us but Pam Golding.
One just needs to read the drivel on the 24.com sites to see the quality of reporting we have in this country. One just needs to watch the contrived Carte Blanche shows popping up like fungus everywhere to see the lack of originality in the media. When someone in Cape Town tells me they work in media I cringe inside for them. They usually have a BA from Unisa and/or no propery journalistic experience. Reporting on matters seems to be what white kids do when they aren't particularly bright or able to crack it anywhere else. Reminds of the old SAR jobs.
@ Anon, not just white kids, I can assure you: my white colleagues were lodged in about 1972 ideologically and culturally (one old guy loathed Mandela simply because "in de army" he had been told every morning that Mandela was a terrorist mass-murderer), but my coloured and black colleagues brought a spectacular ignorance combined with a blazing confidence that they were right about everything.
I once had a blazing row with a black colleague when I pointed out a spelling mistake of his. He told me that I was wrong and he was right. I showed him the word in a dictionary, at which point he said, "Yeah, but dictionaries are racist because they're written by white people." The chutzpah to challenge the official dictionary of your third language and to turn it into a racist conspiracy against you - that takes a special genius.
The irony is that we desperately need a media tribunal in this country. Many of our newsrooms are rotten to the core with unrepentant racists, crooked little shysters on the take from big business, liars, cheats and con-men. But of course all of those can easily be bought and silenced. The ANC will go after the honest and incorruptible ones - the M&G, Noseweek, Sunday Independent - and leave the scum untouched.
As for Media24's integrity, ask yourself this: when was the last time ANY Naspers newspaper dug up ANY dirt on powerful politicians? After all, silence is golden.
This is not a South African phenomenon. There is some good journalism here in the UK, but I cringe when I see what papers like the News of the World etc. consider what's newsworthy. But they are successful because they publish what people want, unfortunately.
The only SA publication that I read regularly is The Daily Maverick.
http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/
Media 24 pensioned off their most experienced journalists and replaced them with newbies fresh from their Damalin 1 year diploma courses in Journalism to save money.
I got my job in a similar way. I am the assistant editor for a company that produces a series of trade journals. Prior to that I had written some commercial features (advertorials) on a freelance basis after losing my job as an alarm installer. It's demanding but they can pay me less because I don't have single relevant qualification. All I can do is write. I often meet masters and honours journalism grads looking for work and with huge (I mean 200K plus) debts to pay off. They are fucked in this market. The thing that was going to ensure their middle class dreams is the thing that's going to make sure they live in the ghetto. And I think: better you than me buddy. finally this bullshit, low wage-low-skill sweatshop abaortion of a globalised economy is working my way for once.
I make no apologies. Darwin would back me on this one (fucking Milton Friedman too).
@ Benjamin
The Daily Maverick is a finely crafted product expertly designed to play up to the basest white middle class prejudices. They openly admit their editorial is ideologically biased; they just turned it into a selling point.
Their international opinion pieces (they don't do articles, just opinions) are pure recycled neo-con trash.
Read the daily maverick and you're sucking Alan Craig-Knott's dick. If you agree with the editorial line in the DM you are saying "I'm a white middle class drone that enjoys sucking millionaire cock. I will believe anything as long as it's written by someone white, who says he's standing up to communism."
I wouldn’t bank on them being around for long. They are utterly dependent on recycling other people’s stories to produce material (“material” needs to flow so people will click through every day and keep the advertisers happy). Note the frequent articles on new media business models and debates on things like web pay walls. This is the stuff they are spending most of their time thinking about, they are just killing two birds with one stone by recycling some of their research into “material”. When the traditional media tanks, the DM will follow them down on the next flush.
PS: When I was freelancing and trying to break into “real” journalism I suggested pieces on SA’s property bubble to several editors – partly inspired by the things I was reading on this blog. I quickly learned that was the best way to ensure they stopped replying to your emails.
@ Benjamin
Note as well that the Daily Maverick has yet to run a single piece on the property bubble. They ain't geniuses, that’s for sure.
@ Anonymous
It's really refreshing to see someone insulting me anonymously with such witty eloquence. I can assure you that I'm not "sucking Alan Craig-Knott's dick", or any other millionaire's private or not-so-private parts. I wasn't endorsing DV, just pointing to an alternative that some readers might enjoy. Form your own opinions.
You said "the Daily Maverick has yet to run a single piece on the property bubble." Here's one, actually describing prices as possibly "too high", which you don't seen in the mainstream:
"Are property prices still too high?"
- http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-01-08-are-property-prices-still-too-high
Uh Bean Counter, before you blanket insult South Africa's middle class, pay a visit to your local library willya. There are plenty of people reading, sure they're not reading South African fiction because we know if it isn't a worthy anti-apartheid tome it's grim poverty porn. That's what publishers like, the reading public isn't fooled so easily and they're not going to shell out hard earned money to have themselves bashed masochistically over the head with Albie Sachs latest meanderings. Books are expensive, hopefully removing VAT will help this.
@Anon, sorry but the stats say different, and so do my "library activist" friends who are close to giving up.
According to the latest stats, about 4.5-million South Africans use public libraries. Of these, 3.2-million are school pupils. The majority of these kids are using the library for research and revision (school projects) but let's be optimistic and say that half are taking out books for pleasure and leisure. That's 1.6m young readers.
That leaves 1.3m adult readers of fiction, non-fiction, magazines - and pensioners who've just wandered in to read the papers.
1.2 million kids, 1.3 million adults, 2.5 million readers in total.
My friends report that most of South Africa's 1,200 public libraries are used by poor people. There are also various adult education schemes that use libraries, which means it's not unfair to suggest that of those 2.5 million, perhaps a third are not "middle class".
All of which leaves us with a very generous estimate that 1.7 million middle class people use public libraries.
OK, you say, but many middle class people buy their books. Yes, up to a point: around 600,000 books are sold in SA every year. About 100,000 of these are "Pass Your Learners/Drivers License Easily". Which leaves 500,000 per year. Again, many of these are repeat buyers: the book-sellers I know estimate that the average customer buys 6 or books a year. So that's 83,000 people who buy books.
How large is our middle class? Perhaps 4 million blacks? 3 million out of 4.5 million whites? Around 1.5 million out of 5 million coloured and Indian?
So out of a middle class of about 8.5 million people, 1.7 go to libraries and 83,000 buy their books. 1.783 million out of 8.5 million people.
In short, only one in five middle class South Africans ever reads anything resembling a book. And that, my wildly optimistic reading friend, is what you call a profoundly illiterate nation.
I'm not nearly qualified enough to add too much to this conversation, but I personally don't do hard copies anymore. Many people, especially the young middle class professionals purchase e-books these days (including fiction). With the Amazon kindles and iPads around, aren't hard copies becoming obsolete? This could just explain why the only people still going to libraries are those without access to the internet.
@ Anon, you've answered your own question: hard copies will exist as long as poor people remain poor. As for the middle class, the number of ebooks bought every year in SA is in the low single thousands. I'm afraid there's just no getting around the reality that we are not a reading nation, which means we are a nation with profoundly retarded critical faculties ("Dr Verwoerd is such an educated man!", 1961 - "Mr Mbeki is such an educated man!", 1999)
Isn't going to a library a very narrow definition of reader?
Don't "The Voice" and "Die Son" count as reading material? I mean, they are wonderfully lurid examples of gutter journalism but people do have to actually read in order to get their daily doses of tits, sports and crime stories.
@ Anon, there's a big difference between being able to read (knowing what printed symbols represent which sounds and words) and being literate (being able to understand a text, to compare it to others you have read and to draw your own conclusions from it). I think our tabloids are to literacy what McDonalds is to nutrition: yes, you can eat it, but it's not good for you and leaves you hungrier than before.
Yes, very patronising, the only people using the library have no Internet, very ignorant too. There are people in this world for whom the candy floss of the internet is just not enough. We need deep nutritious reading, and large quantities of it and none of us can justify the cost of 2-3 books per week from kindle when there's a library waiting for us. Sure If I find something in the library I like I'll buy it, but it's the ultimate try before you buy. Besides, there are people who (choke) actually don't have the Internet.
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