It’s not every day that you get an ordinary reader of your newspaper objecting to a choice you have made about your lead article for the week.
Last week was one of those days that are not a daily – or should I rather say a weekly – occurrence because of the fact that my publication is not a daily but a weekly local newspaper.
When I arrived in the office from one of my community stakeholder engagements as editor of the publication, I was given a copy of the previous week’s edition by a colleague who was in the office and who happened to answer my office phone in my absence.
At the top of the newspaper, next to the masthead, she had scribbled a telephone number and a message saying: “Please call this gentleman. He is upset about your front page article. He says he does not like it and it does not deserve to be on the front page.”
I took to my desk phone, called the gentleman and introduced myself with all the necessary details, as required by our profession so that the person on the other end of the line would know who he or she was speaking to. I then told him I was returning his call.
This gentleman immediately started venting his anger about the said article of ‘PG’ being on the front page and what he spoke about to the audience in Alex. He lectured me about the fact that the said article of ‘PG’ had nothing to do with Alex and that this man has never set foot in Alex.
The cardinal mistake I made, was to not ask him who he is, where he is calling from and the name of the institution he represents. I guess, however, that he would just have told me he is an irate resident of Alex, incensed by my front page article.
I tried to reason with him that the event where ‘PG’ spoke, was held in Alex where Alex News circulates.
By the way, for those of you who may not know who ‘PG’ is, he is the former Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, and one of the leading anti-corruption crusaders in our ‘not so young anymore’ democracy that turned 21 years old almost three years ago.
Our democracy is no longer an infant. It’s an adult now even though we never offered it the traditional key to celebrate its symbolic adulthood with all the attached perks: you can come home late now because you are grown up and have your own symbolic key to open the door for yourself.
The gentleman then went on to accuse PG of being a criminal who has committed a heinous crime. I cautioned him to be very careful as PG could sue his pants off him as he has never been convicted in any court of law, let alone charged for the alleged crime he was insinuating PG has committed.
He, first of all, denied that the event was in my own backyard, Alex and Alex Mall – to be precise at The Establishment and that I was not the organiser of the event, something else he had accused me of. Apparently, I organised PG’s visit to Alex so that I could write that story.
Reading in between the lines I suspected he was a die-hard supporter of one of the many factions of our erstwhile and now bitterly fragmented movement. I then pointed out to him that NDZ [Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma] was here a few months ago and we also published that story on the front page. Why didn’t he phone to complain about that?
JZ has also been to Alex at least four times and each time he was front page news as well. Why didn’t he call me to complain that NDZ and JZ were not local news, even if they were in Alexandra and did not deserve to be covered by a local newspaper as that is a perceived domain for national papers, as he put it.
Well, we agreed to disagree, as enshrined in our Constitution and he told me he ‘was going to set up a press event of his criminals to talk about issues and see whether I would grant him front page too’.
