News • 3 August 2003

Suave not soave but nevertheless slick

Newspapers should not only report, they should transmit the news and they must do it with a feeling for the people and the times, Saviour Balzan writes

Returning home early on Saturday, after having screened the stories, I picked up the telecell, as we 40 year-olds call mobiles, and phoned up the office.
"Check the Suave," I am sure I saw it spelt incorrectly.
"Don’t worry Ed," they retorted.
Needless to say, I had good reason to worry, the Italian wine Soave – not a very good one at that, replaced the adjective for polite and sophisticated.
Which brings me to the story that we carried on our back page last week about a Doktor Gheorg or is it Georg and his chauffeur driven presidential like BMW.
The story, which was based on facts rather than hearsay, led to a spate of telephone calls on Sunday morning.
Which led me to a quick riposte from my good self that the reportage was fair and the person in question is a public figure and that I liked the guy after all.
Such writing confirms our newspaper’s reputation of not being a run of the mill newspaper.
It also stops me from doing the wrong things in public, aware that any wrong move will unleash the demons.
What kills me is that there are two truths, one that is spoken and the one that is written. We are prepared to say privately much more than will ever reach the printed media. And what is worse is that in our Maltese psyche the spoken word is not to be confused with the written form.
Which brings me back to the issue of media stories.
The media, for those who still believe that the good media are supposed to be parish newsletters with notices on when the President of the Republic is inaugurating a crib show, is, in my eyes, no media at all.
The real media is the one that reports the President of the Republic is a symbolic figure with no real power and nine out of ten times he arrives late for a function.
That, by Maltese standards, is playing with fire.
But it kills me to see politicians described as innate objects.
I recall that years back when I described a TV journalist as being short and having John Lennon spectacles I was accused of being ‘personal.’
In this stuffy little country where little happens other than an election every five years, we need to walk that extra mile if we are to shake our reader’s attention from the classifieds to the news sections.
Foreign Sundays such as The Observer and The London Sunday Times have realised this, and fine-tuned their stories to respect the way people think and talk.
This is what we are trying to do at MaltaToday. It isn’t easy, and yes sometimes we do cross the line.
But unlike some of our rivals we admit to our mistakes.
Which takes me to another sore point – the issue of surveys. Our competitor The Malta Independent was livid when some two months ago a survey commissioned without our knowledge confirmed that The Malta Independent had reduced its market share and MaltaToday had increased by 152 per cent.
That news was not taken lightly and tempers flared at The Independent with accusations that ‘we’ had cooked the results. One burly elderly editor who adores Alfred Sant as if he were a Padre Pio was cursing MaltaToday in the corridors and once again accusing it of being in the pay of this and that.
This, and other things, led The Malta Independent to commission its own survey for English Sundays - wonder of wonders - which reversed the findings of the independent survey.
So Monday morning I talked to the good fellow who runs MISCO to suggest to him that they should ask all newspapers to register their print and sales figures to stop all this crap.
I told him this only after I read that, according to the MISCO survey The Malta Independent had a 10.9% slice of the market, which if we work out on MaltaToday’s newspaper sales would mean that, The Malta Independent sells 40,000 copies and the Sunday Times with 47% sells 329,000 copies.
Ha, ha!!
The printed media needs a diverse newspaper market and there can be room for everyone.. But when it comes to assessing market share let us go by the methodology used in the Western world - where an audit of print and sales in all newspapers is open to the scrutiny of media audit agencies.
Note: From this issue, MaltaToday will be publishing its print run on the front page.