5 Comments

Johan, dis 'n wonderlike artikel wat jy geskryf oor di eende van koerante en en gee my soveel om oor te dink.

Ek kry soveel uit jou insigte, baie dankie daarvoor.

Is jou kantoor in die Schumann gebou? Ek gee soms klas daar vir besigheidsbestuur dinge, dalk eendag aan jou deur kom klop en vir jou weer en weer kom bedank.

Groete

Van der Spuy Brink vds@corvus.co.za

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Jy's welkom, Van der Spuy. En dankie vir jou gawe woorde.

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Johan, I enjoy your writing, but this piece in particular.

Firstly, on a personal front, I share your history of being a newspaper delivery boy. For almost all of my highschool years, I delivered Die Burger. I know how it feels to get up at 4h30 for 6 days a week! I wasn't my school's newspaper editor, but I did do a lot of layout work and proof reading.

Secondly, this polarised world is a difficult situation. Or should I say that we now see how polarised the world actually is. I said to someone today: Populism is on the rise (and I think you wrote about this too recently) and that critical thinking and rational reasoning seems to be classified as "opinion". Tough world. I'm not sure what to make of it.

My third point is on paid vs free content: Since everybody can have an opinion, and since it's so incredibly easy to publish and spread your content, there just seems little incentive for people to pay for good (and curated) content. If content isn't easy to consume, like requiring 2 second attention span, or is of high entertainment value, it's almost not important. I personally have been struggling with good news sources. Currently, for international news, I prefer The Guardian. I gave up on BBC. CNN and those are too Americanis(z)ed. For local news, it's the Daily Maverick, but it has a particular flavour. A gave up on News24 a long time ago. The journalistic quality is just extremely low in my view.

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And most importantly, Johan, what are we to put the cat's dinner on when print newspapers are gone? Keep things tidy when the kids are doing artwork? Mop up a flood in the bathroom? Etc. etc. Maybe we should start hoarding newspapers while they continue to exist?

It's only because of the Property Argus (remember it?) and my cats' dinner that I have the house I'm in now. Putting the the dishes down on the paper, I noticed a tiny ad for a house whose sale had fallen through, and here I am.

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Yes, my first PhD student's entire dataset came from a serendipitous reading of a newspaper ad too!

But perhaps those chance encounters will continue to happen on our devices, now just the result of serendipity programmed into algorithms. Here's hoping!

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