The Tik Tok influencer who is a shining beacon of hope for print journalism in a dark worldwide web

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Dear DM168 reader,

You are one of the good people who are valiantly postponing an extinction event.

If you subscribed or went out and bought the print version of  Daily Maverick's newspaper DM168 or any other newspaper at your local store, you are also part of an increasingly dwindling species.

A species that savours the pleasure of pausing to read without the need for a battery charger. The pleasure of reading from the first page to the last – or pausing and picking the paper up again, knowing that the satire on page 27 will remain on page 27 and the sports section will still be at the back when you dash off to make a cup of tea.

You absorb every page, undisturbed, sitting at the breakfast table, relaxing in bed, with your feet up, clothed or stark-naked in your garden like one of our regular reader friends who is going through andropause in hot Joburg. Yes, reading a newspaper in the full sun, with just your sunhat and shades on, is a thing.

The writing has been on the wall for us in the newspaper business since 2007, when Apple’s mad genius founder Steve Jobs made the smartphone sexy

Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivers his keynote speech at Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. During the keynote Jobs introduced the new iPhone. Image: David Paul Morris / Getty Images

Jobs did not invent the first smartphone. IBM did so in 1992 with the Simon Personal Communicator (or just IBM Simon), which sold thousands as it was the first phone with a touch screen that you could use to email and make notes.

Those of you who were in my 1980s MTV generation will remember how cool we thought we were when we had our headphones plugged into the Sony Walkman (first the cassette and then the CD version) so we could walk and bop to Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Geldof, Bob Marley, Ma Brrrr, Hotstix Mabuse, The Police and Mango Groove.

With his compact little iPods, Jobs changed all that in the nineties and then went one better. The iPhone. A one-size-fits-all device for phoning, listening to music, taking pictures, texting your friends, playing games and downloading whatever app helps navigate your daily wants and needs. And to read or watch the news wherever and whenever you want.

Jobs’s invention, coupled with the Revenge of the Nerds at a range of US university campuses in the nineties and noughties, saw newspapers, magazines and encyclopaedias replaced by Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is still the local favourite social media platform, with 22 million South Africans telling Ornico that they have used it within a seven-day period. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

I see it on the Gautrain when I commute to Joburg from Pretoria. At taxi ranks. Airport lounges. At home. Work. School. University. Everyone is on some social media platform on their smartphones. Over the past 30 years, we have evolved into Homo phonens. It’s our go-to for everything from finding a squeeze on Tinder to keeping up with friends, neighbours and colleagues on WhatsApp, sharing a picture on Instagram, or keeping in touch with the news that influencers with masses of followers share on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook or X.

Social media engagement has created what Dan Gilmore in 2004 called “We the Media”. Ordinary people — who are not trained journalists and do not work for corporate owners — can tell a story armed with their smartphones and social media apps. What Gilmore did not foresee was how the Nerds whose digital platforms replaced Big Media with “We the Media” became Big Media themselves, allowing everyone and their dark web uncle in the distortion and extortion business to colonise us on our smartphones, invading our entire lives and livelihoods.

It’s so overwhelming and detrimental to our mental health that many people have opted out, choosing instead to pick flowers, go for a walk, bake a cake and totally switch off. Too much garbage information has made many tune out knowledge and information that could nourish them. Social media makes us vulnerable to ignorance and exploitation by the powerful and greedy.

This week I found some hope for us journalists who pour our hearts and minds into newspapers. I read on the Nieman Journalism Lab of a Gen Z influencer named Kelsey Richards, who calls herself the “print princess” and a “media literate hottie” and reads print newspapers on TikTok.

Media Literacy influencer on TikTok Kelsey Richards

Like you, dear DM168 reader, Kelsey gets the power of print. “When you read print media, you give yourself that space to feel those emotions compared to if you read something online and then you immediately switch over to Instagram … and then you go on Twitter … and then you go on Facebook … and then a CNN notification comes up on your phone,” she told Slate last year.

“With all those distractions, those emotions no longer belong to that blocked-out time period. They are now convoluting your schedule, your work, the fact that your mom just texted you that something’s going on with your grandparents – it’s just too much for your body to handle. Print media gives us the opportunity to sit down, and decide when we want to feel the emotions we want to feel, rather than letting some arbitrary algorithm decide how we should feel.”

Right there is a little hope for us who still have ink in our veins. 

Be bold, step way from the algorithms and explore this weeks's DM168.

In this week's DM168 lead story  Caryn Dolley investigates Mexico's deadly fentanyl-producing traffickers and unravels  the evidence  that these fentanyl cartels are active in South Africa.

Estelle Ellis takes us to the town of Komani (formerly Queenstown) where residents have gone to court to dissolve their municipal council and appoint competent administrators after experiencing years of neglect and weeks of power outages. 

And our Stanford correspondent Liz Clarke shows us  a glimpse of how the power of a community's volunteer spirit can light up a small town.

Yours in defence of truth (and newspapers) 

Heather

Share your views with me at [email protected]

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.