Newspapers

It took me a while to notice, but the good old "Namib Times" has finally also moved into the "Internet age" with their very own website.

It's a refreshing move - after all, I've certainly been missing the news from the coast for all these years, so with Floris Steenkamp now joining the ranks of other Namibian newspapers in presenting their current news on the Internet, we finally have most of the Namibian events covered, that are unfolding these days.

Congratulations Floris - and keep up the good work!

Impressive - The Namibian seem to have been strolling a bit through hyperspace, resulting in an Article that points out government websites in Namibia that have seemingly not been updated for quite a while, some containing information dating back to 1999 only.

The only question we all have is: and when does the Namibian notice that its own community server, one (if not: the) major attraction for visitors to their site, has been down for weeks now? The server developed a couple of problems already as early as the 22.12.2006 - today the entire community server is down, essentially rendering most of the website of The Namibian even less usefull than that of the government.

So if The Namibian is quick to criticise other websites for their "lack of attention", let's quickly do a check to see how well they keep their own front yard clean and operational:

Sometimes New Era publishes articles that are defending their position. Many times they seem to publish articles just so they can congratulate their government for still being so kind to finance them. And you can bet your last shirt that if both happens in just one article, you will get yet another "reader's letter" that tries to top this:

Lister: A Case of Sour Grapes?

And that's then proudly published again on that website, probably as some kind of "see! Other people actually share our warped views too..." thing - and it really makes me chuckle as to how they manage to shoot at their own feet again

Some of the accusations from this letter really warrant some comments:

She knows that her paper stands to suffer customer defection to New Era because of this and now she’s using these dirty tactics to make the government look bad for making an excellent decision.

We should keep in mind reality here: it's quite clear that the government imposed ban on The Namibian seems to have trigerred actually the exact opposite: instead of a declining number of readers, the constant controversy about the ban itself seems to trigger such a lot of interest, that people actually started to buy the paper just so that they can find out what all that hullabaloo is all about. That has constantly increased the number of readers - and that in turn seems to have attracted droves of advertisers, that recognise that this daily newspaper is reaching far more readers than any other daily in Namibia.