I just wrote something on my Facebook page on the above subject and I might write more over there because with the FB's fine privacy settings I can afford to be more candid. Here you have to wonder what I wish to tell but deferring to better judgement chose to sealed my lips, or may be harden my keyboard.
Even if bits and bytes are practically free, you must have noticed that I do not like to write too much. How to tell you that the real estate market is not well. Something I felt should have happened here two years ago but they were able to postpone it until now.
Yesterday, I bought ice-cream for the children after we had dinner with friends. In the ice-cream parlour was a very thick weekly property market magazine. I told our friends, let's do an experiment. Pick any page in this more than an inch thick magazine and let's see if it has bad news.
The first random page we flip to was total bad news. We repeated the exercise two more times, and got the same result. The only improvement is when one of the page carried adverts. After all, imagine when you flip you have the left and right page.
What is not said is more interesting and important than what is said.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I've periodically done this "good news:bad news" test on English-language newspapers, often in different countries. I quickly scan each news item and decide if it is clearly a good piece of news, or something that is neutral (simply factual, neither good nor bad) or clearly bad. I usually do this for say the first 10 pages or so (before getting to the Sports section, which is tough to decide - depends on which team or sportsperson you support). So anyway with my good news:neutral news:bad news categorisation, I've found that it quite consistently returns a ratio of 1:4:5 or 1:3:6. Kinda depressing, huh.
Interesting!That night my friend told me that the Good News paper, actually better known as "Gulf News" for those not so familiar, which includes me also can no longer resist from publishing bad news.
Post a Comment