All the News That Fits

I pretend to be a newspaper person, so I can say with some assurance that the newspapers here, with the exception of the Mail & Guardian and Business Day, are pretty mediocre. They're frequently saved from looking totally useless by their regular use of wire copy. Media critics here blame it on bad management: on massive cutbacks and the departure of senior journalists and editors. Sounds like a familiar lament from back home.

But there's one newspaper, a new one published in Cape Town called the Voice, that is unabashedly bad. And I mean baaaaad. It's so bad, it pushes against that barrier of being so-bad-it's-good until it breaks through the other side and becomes downright bad again.

I read an article in one of the other newspapers about the Voice, and the Voice editors made the point that there are massive segments of the South African population that aren't regular newspaper readers, and if their trashy rag is getting them to pick up the paper, then it's a good thing. And, they said, they don't just write about the outlying shacktowns and settlements when there's an outlandish crime story there. Point taken.

The Voice is a true tabloid, of the British model, complete with Page 3 girls. How closely does it hew to the tabloid formula? They put a story on their front page about a woman who had a divine image appear on her bathroom window. The headline, in something like 78-point text:

JESUS LIVES IN MY TOILET.

Don't believe me? You should NEVER doubt a journalist, of all things. Click here for proof.

I love this newspaper. Its reporters assume that its readers understand both English and Afrikaans, which is the first language of many in this corner of the country--black and white, but mostly the so-called "coloured," or people of mixed heritage. So the Voice uses Afrikaans words in the headlines when English words just won't do.

It also publishes jokes sent in by readers. Here's a sample from today's paper:

Q: What should you do if you see your ex-husband rolling around in pain on the ground?
A: Shoot him again.
Q: What do you call a dead blonde sitting in a cupboard?
A: Last year's winner of the annual hide-and-seek contest.

The nice woman at the corner shop, who knows I'm a wanna-be foreign correspondent, can't get over the fact that I keep buying the Voice. "This is not good journalism," she warns me about twice a week. But this morning she and another customer were pouring over a Voice story about a zebra that fell in love with a donkey in Barbados. Their offspring has been dubbed a zonkey.

Another paper, the Argus, has a daily feature between the crosswords on the back page of the classifieds. The feature is called Scribble Space. It's just an empty square. It stands to reason, I suppose, that it's designed for people to work out clues for the crossword puzzles in that space, but with trees at a premium, you would think they would make better use of their news hole than this.

Now, in what is of course a non sequitur, since I was speaking just now of bad management and nonsensical graphics, here's a picture of the Newsday Pyramid, a powerpoint slide that was distributed along with a memo in the newsroom of my former employer the other day. If anyone out there can help me make heads or tails of it, I would deeply appreciate it:



Click to see a larger version of The Newsday Pyramid.