Spring-cleaning and futureproofing

As we count down to Pesach this weekend, many of us are furiously clearing out our homes of chometz to put in place this annual eight-day alternate existence. Essentially, we’re spring-cleaning our homes, cleaning out all the nooks and crannies to ensure no tiny bits of shmutz are stuck there.

Turns out spring-cleaning has roots in Judaism and preparation for Pesach. It’s not surprising, considering it’s spring in Israel now, and there’s lots of cleaning happening there for Pesach.

I guess, the more years you do Pesach prep, the more organised you become and the easier it gets. Only, I have it on good authority, it never becomes a simple, fun task. It’s around this time of year that wherever I go, I seem to hear lots of women complaining about the amount of work it takes for the “changeover”.

However, there is invariably something therapeutic and healthy about cleaning, sorting out, and getting rid of all the unnecessaries. It may not be fun, but somehow it seems to cleanse a person in more ways than one.

When you have that empty shelf, you start afresh with what you put on it. When your cupboards are bare, you make new and potentially wise decisions about what to fill them with.

So, this time of year is a wonderful time of renewal, changing focus, and upgrading what we do because of all the cleaning and changing.

And so it is with the SA Jewish Report. As you know, at the beginning of this year, we found ourselves in a precarious financial situation. We called on our community to help, and people have been incredibly generous.

Having said that, we realised that we couldn’t escape what has been happening to media around the world, namely the need to ultimately move online only. We must futureproof our SA Jewish Report media platform no matter what!

We do understand that our newspaper is a “Shabbos read” for many, and others just love reading the hard copy version of the newspaper. I get it.

However, the costs of printing and distribution are exorbitant, and make this newspaper an extraordinarily expensive venture. These expenses will only increase as time goes by.

So, we have started a gradual process of futureproofing our newspaper. This week, you will be able to download and print your own edition of the newspaper on your home printer. For those who have tried printing the pdf version before and found it impossible to read because the print is so small, we have changed that for you.

We have made it A4 compatible, so if you print out the A4 version on your home printer, it will be easy to read. You can even staple the pages together so you can easily page through the newspaper as you always have.

This is an excellent alternative to reading the newspaper online.

Don’t get me wrong, for now and the foreseeable future, we will still print the SA Jewish Report, and it will be available at the regular outlets. However, we aren’t printing as many as we used to so you might find it easier to print your own personal copy at home.

Effectively, you have two options for reading the print version. You can also read the newspaper online on your cellphone, laptop, tablet, or a variation of this anywhere in the world.

You can pick and choose to read whichever stories you want from our weekly newsletter that goes out on a Thursday.

Soon, the newsletter will also be multiplying. By this, I mean we will be putting out a second newsletter during the week, which will go out on a Tuesday. This will focus specifically on international news and some community titbits.

In doing this, we are encouraging you to use our website and offering you more through our online presence.

We do have a clear goal in sight – to be around for as long as there’s a Jewish person in South Africa. We’re not going anywhere, but to ensure this, we have to look further into the future to see where this newspaper needs to be in it.

So, this week, why not download the A4 print edition and print it out to see for yourself? Can you get used to it? The truth is that reading print newspapers is a habit of all of us over a certain age grew up with. I still love the smell of newsprint. It reminds me of my parents’ home when I was a kid. It reminds me of great conversations emanating from what I read, and wonderful articles that inspired, excited, and even angered me.

I remember thinking when I read newspapers as a teenager that they made me smarter. I almost felt my brain getting bigger with the knowledge I gleaned. I know that sounds silly, but I still believe that knowledge is power.

And that’s what we do our best to give you – facts, views, insights, great stories. That’s what the SA Jewish Report is all about, whether you read it online, on an A4 printout at home, or in our print edition. We bring you the stories that we believe are important for you to read. You then have a choice.

We aren’t foolproof and there are some weeks, like this one in fact, when we battle to find news to give you. And there are others when we don’t have space to fit all the phenomenal and vital news stories.

In our special Pesach edition, however, we have some phenomenal Pesach thought-leadership pieces and many other wonderful stories for you to read over the chag.

So, as we at the SA Jewish Report renew our vow to you to be the best we can be, I urge you to do the same for yourselves and your families. We often get into ruts, and getting out of them seems particularly difficult. We find ourselves with bad habits, and it’s generally easier to stick with them. Don’t! Rather look ahead. Futureproof yourself and your family, much like we’re trying to do to ensure the SA Jewish Report’s place for decades to come.

Shabbat shalom and chag Pesach sameach!

Peta Krost

Editor

PS: We won’t be publishing next week because of Pesach, but will be back on 24 April.