What are they smoking at Times of Zambia?

The football world woke up to newspaper back page headlines with the question “What do you think they're smoking over there at Emirates?”

This headline was conceived from a twitter ‘rant’ by Liverpool football club owner, John W Henry. The Liverpool owner let rip at Arsenal football club after the latter bid £40,000,001.00, for then Liverpool star player Luis Suarez. It appeared Henry was offended by Arsenal offering just £1 over the £40million to trigger a key release clause in Luis Suarez’s contract at Liverpool. Luis Suarez ended up at Barcelona, but that tongue-in-cheek tweet by Henry has become a phrase ‘to reckon with’ in some sorts.

Well, I have personally used the same phrase a couple of times when looking at the Times of Zambia newspaper. I am not a regular reader of the newspaper, but on a number of occasions when I picked up one I was appalled by what I considered a depravity of seriousness on the part the editorial team. It was almost as if they ran the paper in much the same way I do my blog site. Type stories on a Saturday evening and Sunday morning put the post online, with no due decency and propriety given to proof reading.

I say so because the paper was on many occasions bursting with spelling and grammar errors which didn’t need a group of English language professor proof readers to correct but just a single high school lad. This was all compounded by the fact that the paper has in my view been lacking depth of content but just profligacy in political propaganda. I always wondered how the professional journalists that walked the corridors of the newspaper felt like every time they saw grammar and spelling error strewn papers on their desks.

My thoughts were that they should have been ashamed of themselves, and they needed to change something at that propaganda machine that was clearly void of any essential ethics and basic tenets that are a bedrock of professional journalism. I am not sure if the team at the newspaper dug deep inside of themselves to challenge each other to bring out the best rudiments of journalism in them, or there was a new editorial team that was set up. The truth is that there is great change at Times of Zambia.

There is still the odd spelling error but all that can be forgiven by the way headlines are being coined in recent publications of the paper. It is almost as if they have ‘brought sexy back’ to journalism. The newspaper layout too has been changed to ooze a level of ‘sexy’ I thought only The Post newspaper at its prime, could manage. Then there is this ‘fancy word play’ with their headlines that makes you want to buy the paper. It is not really sensational headlines but just a word play that just leaves one amused.

I give whoever is responsible for the change at Times of Zambia a lot of respect. They recognized a weakness and they worked at correcting it. They might have been smoking something that made them prone to spelling and grammar errors but they swapped that to smoking something that makes them print clever word play headlines.

Whatever the case, they are smoking something over there at times.