On making history or making a difference

Yesterday I made history.

But it’s a distinction I can do without. I became the first South African to be fired for blogging.

It’s a dangerous thing, this blogging. Even if your judge doesn’t have the foggiest idea what a blog is; even if he thinks sub-editors are not journalists and even if he thinks toeing the company line is more important than the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or your own conscience, blogging can get you fired.

OK. Since I have been fired and no longer work for “the Company”, I can confirm what most of you in the blogosphere know — I was fired from Sowetan shortly after 3pm on Thursday November 29 2007.

I was found guilty of gross misconduct for bringing the Sowetan‘s name into disrepute by criticising it in a blog and for making public confidential company information. That’s how the Sowetan sees it.

Which is a pity because it reinforces the view that it is a sub-standard newspaper. And it certainly is not. Today’s (Friday’s) edition is a massive 72 pages and you don’t get that size of tabloid if you’re a crappy paper. I was very proud to work at the Sowetan and prouder to have called some of the fine people there my colleagues.

And when I left yesterday afternoon there were six — only six — sub-editors fighting like Spartans at Thermopylae just to get through the story load. “Eish, bra’ Llew, I’m just shovelling the shit through. I don’t even have time to check spelling mistakes — let alone write a decent headline. Sorry about your firing, but they’ll see their arses. Soon … only a matter of time. Gotta get back to it … Cheers.”

Any first-year journ student knows those odds can’t be played forever.

People like me have become disillusioned with the constant fight to mentor, train, improve, create systems, work the loooong hours only to face the empty and broken promises, the mouldy old carrot that “we’re going to make changes — just hang in there”.

The adage about fooling all of the people all of the time leaps to mind. In the past year, more than 20 people have left or been forced out. About five have replaced them — and now some of them are just keeping their heads down until next year.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist — hell, you don’t even have to be a dumb sub-editor like me — to see the Sowetan is a newspaper in deep, deep trouble. It is teetering on the precipice of self-destruction, yet remains doggedly blind to the severity of its predicament. And the power brokers who hold the keys to its salvation are too engrossed in polishing their egos, playing kindergarten king-o’-the-castle games and firing or forcing out any dissenting voices to realise they are the problem.

No newspaper can survive on incompetent and underskilled cheap labour, denialism, no training, the constant lowering of the bar, the refusal to heed warnings, the dull drone of mediocrity, putting sycophantic and mechanistic loyalty to “the Company” above striving for excellence … the list goes on and on.

The really competent, creative, passionate core of people is buckling under the load of making more and more shit shine. Morale is non-existent. Even the permanently happy people that bring sunshine to every office have become hushed and insular. Absenteeism is as rife as the pervasive cavalier attitude towards deadlines. The fact that not one of the four scheduled sittings of my disciplinary hearing (involving only four people, for heaven’s sake) started on time speaks volumes about a business where making deadlines is supposed to be one of the very cornerstones of existence.

However, they were faster than a redneck leaving a Gay Pride parade in blocking my company access security card. Funny how the hostile anti-social things get done so quickly when people are running scared …

Sadly at the Sowetan, a newspaper alive with possibilities (if you get my drift), every day is like a constant loop of Survivor, with sick-building syndrome or the flu or just plain fatigue claiming victim after victim. As many perspicacious and experienced newspeople have told me in the past two weeks, “The fact that they’re even conducting a disciplinary hearing heaps far more ‘disrepute’ on them than anything you said in your blog, Llewellyn.”

In the past week alone I was taken to one side by five different people and told that “this bullshit hearing thing” had made up their minds for them. “Come January, I’m outta here,” was the crystal-clear message. Not that I can blame them any longer. I’ve been in newsrooms, subs’ rooms, boardrooms, bar rooms, staff rooms and classrooms for more than 32 years. You get to recognise the signs. This isn’t yuppie flu. This is serious.

Many of us have made proposals, tutored, coached, mentored, made suggestions, recommendations and created guide lines, but they have all been drowned in that bottomless pit call “We’ll Have to Look into It”.

Despite my sacking for speaking out about the needless and exploitative frustrations of fewer and fewer people having to make silk purses out of more and more sows’ ears, the Sowetan will get the style guide I promised.

And if my firing helps pull this potentially great paper back from the edge and gets some hard-core long-overdue decisions made … well, that’s a distinction I don’t mind owning.