It’s always a pity when a newspaper has to close. Sometimes, it’s a tragedy.
It’s a tragedy, for instance, when a newspaper is a voice of truth and reason, a platform for dangerous views and ideas, and a government shuts it down and sends the police to confiscate its computers and presses.
It was a tragedy when Jimmy Kruger, then Minister of Justice in the National Party Government, banned The World and its weekend edition in 1977, little more than a year after the Soweto uprising.
It was a tragedy when the Rand Daily Mail printed its final edition in 1985.
But this weekend, when The Weekender appeared on the streets with a long front-page sidebar about its own demise, it wasn’t a tragedy; it was a pity.
It was a pity for the hard-working crew of staffers and freelancers; it was a pity for the intrepid advertising sales team; it was a pity for the small but loyal band of readers.
I have to be honest. I was not among them. I bought the paper a couple of times, and I liked the way it looked and read, but I didn’t like it enough to make it a habit.
Call me shallow, but I want quantity as well as quality from a weekend newspaper. It’s the one time of the week when a paper begs to be wallowed in, indulged in, spread over a floor or table with supplements and sections and inserts vying for your attention.
That’s why the weekend editions of the world’s great papers, such as the NYT, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Observer, are such a pleasure to see, read, and feel. They have heft, sometimes ridiculously so. Not just physical heft, but heft of information, news, opinion, trivia, entertainment.
They’re a multi-course meal, filling enough to last you the whole day, maybe the whole weekend, maybe even all the way until Wednesday. The Weekender, by contrast, was nouvelle cuisine.
It was lean, slim, minimalist. That was supposed to be its appeal, of course. But that was also its greatest limitation. It just wasn’t satisfying enough to merit an investment of R12.50 per edition. It could and should have offered more value, not just for money, but for the read.
And of course it couldn’t, because of the Quality Paradox.
That’s what happens when a newspaper can’t attract enough of an audience to attract the advertising it needs to be big enough to attract the audience it deserves.
But the other, bigger problem, was that The Weekender was chiefly designed to be read by a small niche of people who no longer really have the inclination to read newspapers.
Oh sure, they read newspapers; lots of newspapers. Just not on a floor or a table anymore. They read them on the screen of a computer or a phone. They read them at home and at work and while walking down the street.
They read the NYT, and the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Times, and The Observer, and dozens more papers and magazines from all over the world, glancing at the scroll of headlines in an RSS feed, clicking on links in a tweet, saving long articles for later perusal, like you might fill your pockets with food at a heavily-laden buffet in case you feel a little hungry later on.
There is so much to read these days, right before your eyes, on call and online whenever you feel the urge. And no, it’s not free; bandwidth costs money, even if all you’re doing is flicking through chunks of text.
But the point is, why would you want to go out on a Saturday morning and buy something more to read, especially when there was nothing much to read in it in the first place?
It’s a pity that The Weekender had to close, but it’s an even bigger pity, in the 21st Century, that they somehow didn’t seem to see it coming.
