» And how about a lazy newspaper reporter …

And how about a lazy newspaper reporter …

January 25th, 2010

I also had a bad experience of lazy journalism from a leading national business publication this week - one from whom I have come to expect higher standards.

A reporter called me with a string of questions about the eTV saga. When I told him that he could find many of the answers in his own paper that morning in a very good article written by one of his colleagues, he said he had not had time to read it.

Well, if you don’t have time, why should I find the time to fill the gaps for you … I should have put the phone down.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print

2 Comments Add your own

1. Bernard | February 23rd, 2010 at 3:50 pm

Surprised by not surprised! In the past 10 years of my life working as a Journalist, i’ve seen these kind of a lazy journalism to a number of colleagues in different newsroom. For the problem to get better-it seems is getting worse! However, is not all journalist who are ‘arm chair’ reporters with blind eyes.

We still have good quality journalists in most of our newsroom across the country. But I pity that poor journalist and is time for him/her to peel thy eyes and know that as a journalist you must be a great reader!
2. Brett | March 15th, 2010 at 6:45 pm

Crikey Bernard, if that’s how you construct your sentences I’m amazed you’ve lasted 10 years in the business.

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed

Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)