Polishing turds won't save our papers
Circulation of English language broadsheets in South Africa is largely in decline. We all know that. But the response hasn't been to invest in better content. Instead, staff numbers have been slashed, news from elsewhere gets regurgitated and a fixation with other media - websites, multimedia and, of course, Twitter - has developed.
Most of our broadsheets have become emaciated pastiches of newspapers, stuffed with copy from the news wires. I'm sick of seeing SAPA reports every time I turn the page - all too often they're badly written, inaccurate and lacking nuance and context. The shoddy copy is hardly surprising when the overstretched and under resourced agency is often one of the few news organisations that actually bothers to cover a host of events across South Africa.
Across the spectrum, the desire to offer compelling, relevant content to readers seems to have evaporated. While cost-cutting and declining ad revenue has obviously impacted on the quality of content, a championing of mediocrity is as much to blame.
Gone are the days, it seems, when South Africa's journalists actually went out and hunted down exclusives. Instead, we're served up stories that are in within easy reach: it's so much easier to fill column inches about the folk across the corridor or fulminate interminably about the latest antics of Malema (or new bad boy on the block Jimmy Manyi) than it is to deliver an exposé about muti murders in Limpopo.
Even areas not too far beyond the comfortable confines of Johannesburg's northern suburbs seem too much of a stretch: the best, most comprehensive reporting on Diepsloot's mob justice was in the New York Times - not in any of our rags. This results in the ANCYL's buffoonery or Manyi's madness getting disproportionate coverage. South Africa is a vast and astonishingly complex, diverse nation. It's a great injustice that our newspapers largely fail to reflect this, and that so many stories remain untold.