the biggest thumbs down in years in my book for what I feel is a pathetic lack of the most basic communication from MultiChoice and Trace Sports having the new channel's launch party in Johannesburg on Tuesday night.
i knew nothing.
your communicating with stakeholders - or a stakeholder - me, as a journalist, is possibly the least deplorably bad in this instance, MultiChoice. i really don't know what else to say.
i'm not often emotionally moved. as a hard news journalist i've seen dead people, terrible circumstances; covered horrible stories. so covering television isn't really, on most days, that emotionally moving. it doesn't affect me. i can easily remain detached.
and yet right now i'm extremely upset and full of different emotions and can barely contain myself from anger, disappointment, even resentment, sadness; disbelief.
it's not that I wanted to be invited (although yes, I probably would have loved to be there).
it's that nobody - nobody - could even so much as pick up a phone or write a note to say "hey dude, we know you've actually wrote the most about this subject and this channel and us and for the longest time and most comprehensively, and clearly you are so interested and we just want to say there is going to be a launch party and just want you to know."
i love television. i love my work. i love writing about it and telling every smallest little detail i know and can find out about it. it fuels me.
and it's really astoundingly astonishing and sorry and hurtful and sad that after 13 years of doing this, and hardly ever becoming emotional or getting affected emotionally as a journalist about the subject which i write about and about an industry i care for - that at this very moment i feel as if somebody - MultiChoice and Trace Sports - took a knife and ripped my stomach open.
overly-dramatic? perhaps. emotional? definitely. angry? youbetcha.
tomorrow i'll be fine again.
but how - without being able to help it - do i feel on an ongoing basis when i have to cover or find news, or have to choose between stories, or think of things going forward when i write about Trace Sports on DStv? am i supposed to think and like Trace Sports? am i supposed to think MultiChoice cares about my needs or interests or and how that is going to reflect back in my coverage of their businesses as a journalist?
a total lack of communication from people who want to say they work at media companies permanently changes you in little ways if you're a journalist. this has now changed me. it will make me in a sense feel less inclined to want to write about Trace Sports. and that attitude won't ever easily change.
whenever i meet people - and boy do i meet a lot of people - and someone mentions Trace Sports in South Africa - gues what story and what kind of story will be always atop my mind to tell.
and it makes me feel that - even though i asked MultiChoice exactly a month ago whether there would be some press or media launch for Trace Sports - that I can't really trust that company to honestly communicate with me, or that as a journalist who keenly covers them, as if i even matter.
i just feel sad.
