by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes is off to India in September, when he will take up one of the top positions at the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, it was announced recently. In this second part of an interview, Grubstreet talks to Dawes about change in the M&G newsroom, his legacy to the paper and the press’ recent battles with the ruling party.
Grubstreet: Do you think the converged newsroom – how you’ve integrated print and online – is the main mark that you’re 
leaving on the M&G?
Nic Dawes: I certainly think it’s probably the most obvious thing that I’ve tried to do here – to bring some of those (online and social-media) practices into our newsroom, to open us up so that the audience is not so much the audience anymore but participants in what we do.
You have to be really very sanguine and welcome the changes that are going on in our industry because I think they genuinely make us better journalists and make us produce better news products.
I think the other thing is the way we’ve tried to build capacity inside the paper, to keep on doing more thorough public-interest journalism without having new sources of commercial funding. So there’s AmaBhungane (non-profit investigative centre) and the Eugene Saldanha fellowship – these sorts of things, which do substantially broaden the base of what we do and also makes a contribution that goes beyond the M&G in terms of training journalists from other papers and from other countries in terms of advocacy.
And maybe the final thing is opening up a bit more to Africa – trying to bring more Africa coverage into the paper and into the website.
Grubstreet: How are the Zimbabwean sales going (of a special Zimbabwean edition launched earlier this year).
Dawes: They’re solid. I haven’t got the latest figures but I think they’re up from about 500 before the new edition to somewhere in the 2 500-to-3 000 region. They’ve been held back a bit by the fact that we’ve been trucking the paper up to Zimbabwe. It hasn’t been getting there early enough but the edition is really nice.
It’s a nice little bump (in sales) but it’s not absolutely enormous. If we could add another 1 000 on to that, I’d be very happy.
Grubstreet: What has been the biggest challenges of being the M&G editor, do you think?
Dawes: You know, the Mail & Guardian has a very valuable, very rich institutional culture, which makes it resilient and makes its strong. But it can also mean that change is harder even though it’s a small organisation.
I think that you can do things that respect the very, very precious core that the Mail & Guardian is about in a deeply different way – that was the thing that probably took the longest time. I feel that we’ve moved an enormous distance on this but that was probably the toughest thing.
I took over in the teeth of the recession so my initial impulse was to preserve so that we didn’t take deep job cuts and make sure that we were able to produce the minimum core of what we’d always had. So my first period (as editor) was defensive but then we move quite quickly from that to a process of trying to look to the future.
That was tough but it was, ultimately, incredibly satisfying – and I think we have kept the core.
I don’t think anybody feels differently about what the Mail & Guardian is fundamentally about as an investigative, political paper but we are able to do it in so many new ways.
And I hope we also diversified the mix a little bit – put in some detours in the read which are still highly relevant but which take you to other parts of the country and other ways of seeing the world.
Grubstreet: Do you mean, for instance, the reporting you guys have been doing on poverty?
Dawes: Yes, exactly. About six weeks before the Marikana massacre, we published a three-page feature investigation into life around Marikana and how tough it was. So that’s one kind of story.
We’ve also done other kinds of features. Two weeks ago we ran, for instance, a piece on the trade in eggs and fertility between South Africa and India, which I though was fascinating and well written.
We’ve recently started upping our science content, which I think will lighten the paper quite a lot.
It’s very important that the Mail & Guardian not be a miserable trudge from Page 1 to Page 25. The (investigative and political) stories are incredibly important. They’ll always be core to what we do but I don’t want readers to feel that they’re punched in the face on every page. It’s also important for them to laugh a bit or simply to get insight into what is an incredibly textured, complex country.
Grubstreet: Dealing the ruling party must have been a big feature of your editorship. It’s become more difficult in recent years for most editors, hasn’t it?
Dawes: It has by and large become more difficult, I would say.
It certainly felt at times that people had adopted a very deliberate strategy of confrontation rather than engagement, which is disappointing… because it means that one of the most important institutions in national life doesn’t get the coverage that it should get – or that it could get if the leadership and ordinary members of that organisation were capable of engaging more effectively.
I don’t really mind if someone wants to phone me up and yell at me, which they do.
I can take it. But what disappoints me is that we don’t get all the data that we should into the paper because people are reluctant to engage. So that’s a pity.
Some like to make it sound terribly heroic to deal with political pressure but if you just do your job as a journalist, it’s not actually that hard. If you have a very clear set of guiding principles on how you do your work and if you just carry on doing those things, political pressure is actually quite easy to deal with.
Grubstreet: And generally comes with the territory.
Dawes: Ja, exactly.
Grubstreet: So you start at the Hindustan Times at the beginning of September. It sounds like such a massive job. What are you expecting?
Dawes: It’s an immense job and, in the first few months, I will spend quite a lot of time looking very carefully at all the operations, understanding how things work, why things work and why and where they don’t work – and then thinking about what sorts of interventions are appropriate.
But the opportunity to do really, really great journalism is immense. Firstly, the sheer scale of India and its diversity makes it an incredibly rich place for journalists to work and for a newspaper.
Grubstreet: And is the Hindustan Times profitable? Is it on a good wicket?
Dawes: Yes, it is.
It’s an enormous, very complex, very contested social, political and geopolitical country… It’s undergone very, very rapid growth, which has pulled a lot of people out of poverty but which has also produced grave inequality and environmental concerns.
So these are huge stories and there are some brilliant journalists so I think there is great opportunity to try and do the best job possible and reflect that to readers and engage them.
It’s one of the great media markets of the world – and in many ways the last great print opportunity in English. And because print is strong in India, the opportunity is to innovate from a position of confidence rather than from a position of fear.
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.