BRONWYN NORTJE: While fighting fires at home, the media must make time to build
The biggest threat to industries is not an incompetent government but an unplanned future
There is some comfort to be derived from navel-gazing. South Africans’ almost obsessive contemplation of their own struggles and injustices provides a measure of insulation from a wider set of truths that are almost too horrible to contemplate.
To be fair, we have many reasons to be aggrieved: a lack of adequate growth, poor governance and widespread corruption have meant many of the worst of consequences of apartheid have yet to be addressed, and people are starting to question if they ever will be.
This is tragic on its own, but after reading Tim Cohen’s column (Help us continue our quest for top quality, July 17) I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between what has happened to the media in SA and what is happening or has already happened to so many other industries in the country. In short, the troubles on our front lawn often prevent us from dealing with the crisis in the neighbourhood. Cohen explained that when the JSE removed a requirement for listed companies to publish their full results and corporate actions in two national newspapers, it devastated the business press. Although a compromise was reached in that companies are still required to publish their results — but only in one newspaper and greatly truncated — the revenue stream that national business publications such as Business Day depended on dried up.All of this is true, and I can tell you first hand what the removal of these regulations did to our newsroom, but it is also only part of the story. A far more po...
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