Kashiefa Ajam, Saturday Star editor. Picture: Jason Boud/INLSA Kashiefa Ajam, Saturday Star editor. Picture: Jason Boud/INLSA
The only constant in life, say the sages, is change.
We are living through a time of incredible change - all of us. Irrespective of how old we are, change is the constant in our lives.
Around us the talk is of disruption; the biggest taxi company is an app that doesn’t own any vehicles, while the biggest hotel group in the world doesn’t own a single room.
It’s insane at one level, at another it makes perfect sense.
The media world has been disrupted just as much with the advent of social media, which has made every person with a smartphone a journalist, a commentator and - sometimes with catastrophic consequences - a film-maker.
To survive, we all have to change. For us at the Saturday Star it’s about being relevant to you in an environment where you might have heard of the story we would normally want to publish at the same time as our journalists are chasing down leads. It’s about competing for your time on the one day in the week that you have to run about doing personal chores, or when you chase after the kids from birthday parties to sports matches.
Most of all it’s about giving you what you want, not what we think you want - even though, like you, we’re trawling through WhatsApp groups, Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines like diviners of old. Today we bring you a changed newspaper, a new way of presenting you with the news. Hopefully it’s news that you can use - either to make life-changing decisions or just entertain people with around the braai or out at the club later tonight. Your favourites, Personal Finance, Independent Traveller, Weekend Wheels and School Sport are all still there, they’re just packed in one great new lifestyle supplement called Affluence.
Our guarantee, though, in this era of constant change and instant experts in the digital commentariat, is that the baseline standards and principles that have always guided us remain intact.
We will be fair, we will be honest, we will be brave. We will comfort the afflicted and we will afflict the comfortable. That’s our promise. But there’s more. We can’t do this on our own. The success of this paper in particular has always been due to you, our readers. We hope you enjoy the changes. We really do, but if you don’t or if you’ve got suggestions, please drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
Have a great weekend.