SO THERE’s this guy at First National Bank who writes the occasional e-mail to staff called “On Michael J’s mind...” (I suspect he’s the bank’s affable CE Michael Jordaan) who sent out the following e-mail to his staff the week before last. Its headline is “Do we really need newspapers?”
“No this is not another cost-cutting idea,” he says. “All over the world the sale of newspapers is declining. Many daily newspapers are going out of business. Finally the internet with its online, near real-time content is winning. It’s more convenient to click on an article that interests you than to page through a paper. And it’s great to read a story as it’s breaking rather than to wait until the next day.
“Recently a 15- year-old made the front page of the Financial Times on account of a research report he wrote for an investment bank. In the report he concluded that consumers from his generation wouldn’t ever consider buying a newspaper. Quite ironic that the report even made it into the FT!
“Did you know that FNB spends more than R1m per year to subscribe to newspapers and have them delivered to our colleagues. Yet all the news is available online and the paper costs trees. So we (the FNB Exco) think we should simply stop subscribing to papers. Do you agree? Regards, Michael.”
This brings on my palpitations. First, the environment. Trees used to make paper are grown for this purpose. While they are in the ground, they produce oxygen. If there was no market for them, why would anyone plant them? No one plunders natural forests to make paper. They are plundered to make long boardroom tables in banks.
There is nothing “ironic” about the 15-year- old’s story making it into the FT. Printing interesting facts and interpreting them – rather than merely reporting self-serving statistics about the death of inconvenient rivals — is what good newspapers do as a matter of course. That boy will be an FT subscriber by the time he is 21.
Newspaper sales are not declining “all over the world”. They may be in the US and Europe. Everywhere else they are growing. In the last year by almost 3% . Yes, some daily newspapers are going out of business. So far about, gosh, 12! All in the US and all because the global crisis caught them overgeared. How many banks have gone to the wall in the same time? By the way, if this memo is not a cost- cutting idea, why remind readers how much the bank is spending on subscriptions?
But the worst part of the e-mail is this : “yet all the news is available online.” Of course it is but how, Michael J, did it get there? I’ll tell you. It was written and edited by journalists who earn salaries working for newspapers.
You can be indifferent to the future of newspapers but not about journalism. No right-thinking South African should be. Michael J will remember it was newspapers which came to FNB’s defence a few years ago when it dared to stand up for its customers and organised a crime petition to the then president, who didn’t take it well.
Integrity and courage and accuracy in journalism are all oxygen to a democracy and I know of no other way of sustaining it today, other than in a healthy newspaper industry. If you do, Michael J, I hope you are able to come up with suggestions more helpful than a R1m knife in journalism’s back.
I GROVEL at the feet of Peter de Villiers. That was quite brilliant on Saturday and besting the All Blacks three in a row makes us without question the best rugby team in the world. The coach still gives me the willies though when he makes his substitutions at the end of the game — opponents put more points past us when the first team begins to come off than at any other time in the game. Is it really necessary to scare us like that, Peter? I already have a condition.