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by Hanlie Gouws
It's not difficult to spot Denis Beckett in Hyde Park. He stands out as the only denim jacket in a sea of suits and ties. He looks somewhat out of place in the snobbish coffee shop where he buys me coffee, smokes my cigarettes and takes me on a trek through his career as a journalist.The hit series Beckett's Trek has come to an end, and now Denis Beckett is back to his first love: print journalism. That's where he started out in 1972. He worked at The Star, the Rand Daily Mail, World, Drum and The Voice before doing his own thing with his magazine, Frontline. Now he is back full-time at his quarterly magazine, Sidelines. His book on car trouble in the Karoo has just been published in Canada.
It's not that Beckett regrets his stint on TV -he just doesn't rate broadcast journalism very highly.
"The lowest form of journalism is TV. Once I wore red socks on TV. And afterwards people came up to me and said 'Yeah yeah, I saw you wearing red socks on TV.' And the people don't know what the hell you are doing. If you wear red socks, that's the opinion you got."
So now he has exchanged his camera for a keyboard. He is focusing on Sidelines, a hard-hiting mag that prints opinions others don't have the guts to print. But Denis has guts. And he has a lot of respect for print media because it is an art.
"For me, print journalism is the highest form of journalism. You process the words, you sukkel over the words and you sukkel over the sentences and structure, and you have sukkeled over the balance which you all put in an order. You can't do that in broadcast journalism. The spoken word is a loose, lax thing. It is not anything as precise as the written word. Print journalism is the culmination of the art."
But not all print journalism is good journalism. He gets "pissed off" by the extreme "pc-ness" of South African newspapers, and boring articles give him a "pain in the butt".
"Most things you read, you don't particularly want to read or need to read. But the average guy, and that is what distinguishes journalism, doesn't need to read anything. And you want to give him journalism that he wants to read. When I was young, I felt I wanted and needed to know, en nou is ek oud en ek is hardkoppig en ek gee nie 'n donner om what I need to do. So how can you make it accessible to me that I want to read it, so I am enjoying the actual process of getting through the words."
But he warns against over-using the so-called New Journalism tricks that seem to be very popular these days. Strange punctuation and tricks a la Tom Wolfe.
"You have to convey intelligence. But instead people start doing news as a gimmick. The design field has become a joke. Design is so full of stars that we have a lot of blobs and explosions all over the place. It's all designed to disguise the fact that you haven't really got anything to say. En dis twak. Ditto when you are continuously doing new stuff and new stuff to compensate for the lack of substance."
Honest, sincere and to the point. Just how he is. And he is not going to disappear just because he doesn't invade our homes on Tuesdays anymore. He will be around for a long time to come, doing something in the field of journalism. Because he loves it.
"I actually think it's disgusting that I get paid for something I enjoy doing so much."
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