Friday, October 06, 2006

The Citizen gets it


There was a time in the 1990's that I did some work for the Citizen classifieds. I wrote their Ad Lib! classified ads program, which worked on a strange network of XT-class PCs with 20MB hard drives, using XyWrite III Plus as the word processor, and Clipper as the database. In those days the paper was owned by Perskor. I always joked that and their definition of affirmative action was employing people who spoke English.
Now the Citizen is owned by Caxton's, and while I have no time for one of their directors who cheated me out of several thousand Rands a while back, they have finally got a web site and a daily podcast. The mind boggles.
And it's quite good too. Much better than the segmented MoneyWeb one, or the nonexistent 702 or Star ones. Why a radio station can't do a podcast beats me.
In fact it's better than good. It's brilliant! It's professional, clearly read and to the point. 3 minutes is plenty of time to cover the headlines, and its much safer to listen to than trying to read their billboards when driving. The guys who write their billboards come up with some absolute gem headlines. Great stuff!

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