[COMMENT] For far too long now Dr Iqbal Survé, chairperson of Independent Media, and his competitors, Tiso Blackstar in particular, have been using their editorial columns to bash away at each other.
While journalists and their editors from all over South Africa might be enjoying this, the really sad side of this bun fight is that their readers actually couldn’t care less. I am not sure they even know what’s going on.
Many years ago the Financial Mail and its competitor, Finance Week, had a similar fight that went back and forth from one edition to the next. After a while, I did some research and found out that their readers actually didn’t give a hoot about who was right and who was wrong.
I suspect the same thing applies to Survé and his competitors.
From a marketing point of view, they are simply wasting time, money and resources. It’s all just a very poorly scripted soap opera.
Now, I am not suggesting for a minute that the pressure should come off Dr Survé and his self-promotion and naïve propaganda. Nor should it come off Tiso Blackstar and the Sunday Times in particular, for getting things so breathtakingly wrong.
From a marketing point of view, they are simply wasting time, money and resources. It’s all just a very poorly scripted soap opera.
The trouble is once exposés take the form of personal vendettas and slagging matches along with barbed comments and elbows in the ribs, they lose their journalistic integrity.
Both these groups need to stick to the facts and also try and remember that the basis of good journalism is presenting both sides of every story.
Which is a bit of a laugh actually because hardly any news media bother about presenting both sides of a story. They just pump out tsunamis of one-sided stories peppered with the opinions and prejudices of the journalists involved.
Right now there are a lot of journalists on Independent Media newspapers who are not only unhappy and embarrassed but they hang on anyway because, quite frankly they would battle to get jobs anywhere else in a media environment where there is a rush to get the job done with as few journalists as possible, to save costs.
It’s a cruel world for journalists in South Africa right now and frankly, the world over. But it is really sad that they have to continually put aside personal reputations and integrity just to make a living.
Getting back to the Survé vs. Tiso Blackstar spat, neither side is free of guilt; their continued puerile scrapping will come and bite them both very soon.
Newspaper groups are among the country’s worst marketers. Not only that, but many of them don’t have the foggiest idea of what marketing is and how it relates to a newspaper.
A sure sign of utter denialism.
Chris Moerdyk (@chrismoerdyk ) is a marketing analyst and advisor and owner of Moerdyk Marketing with many years of experience in marketing and the media as well as serving as non-executive director and chairman of companies.
