by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Media24’s Die Burger joined an elite group of newspapers this year that are showing signs of arresting circulation decline, which is really something to crow about in this grim market.
As sales were falling across the board, the ABC circulation figures for the second half of last year showed that Die Burger – which has Western 
Cape and Eastern Cape editions (the latter grew out of Die Oosterlig) – was slowing its downwards trajectory. Then in the latest set of ABC figures – for the first quarter of 2013 – Die Burger (Western Cape) netted 51 516 compared with 51 232 in the same period of 2012. It’s Port Elizabeth-based Eastern Cape sister posted 10 721 circulation compared with 10 748 the corresponding period of the previous year.
So stability in a devastating quarter for newspapers, in which the Daily Sun lost 20% of circulation, The Star fell 14% and the Pretoria News shed 12%.
I’m sure the excellent reporting and run of exclusive breaks on the Oscar Pistorius story in the first quarter that Die Burger carried (from its sister paper Beeld) helped to buoy sales. And indeed, Die Burger’s Cape Town-based editor, Bun Booyens, is cautious about singing his newspaper’s praises.
“Let’s be sober about this. I think a lot of these are lapsed subscribers that we’ve won back,” he told Grubstreet last week. “We suffered some real subscriber damage with the Cycad software problem (Media24’s CRM programme that governed subscriptions and distribution). I suspect the gains we made were lapsed subscribers, among others, who we won back – which is in itself encouraging.”
Booyens says that in a peculiar way, the 2010 Cycad drama – which affected all the Media24 papers to the extent that Koos Bekker, CEO of Media24 parent company Naspers, described it as a “bloody mess” – had a silver lining for his team at Die Burger.
“The surprising thing was that whole debacle showed the tremendous brand loyalty Die Burger enjoys because people were calling in and were angry and frustrated, often beyond the point of dignity,” says Booyens, who was made editor in 2010 after editing the travel magazine, Weg & Go, though he had been a reporter and assistant editor at the Die Burger previously.
“But it wasn’t directed at Die Burger as a newspaper but at somebody, somewhere else who was defaulting on their delivery or messing up their account details… If anything positive came out of that episode, it was a better understanding of just how deeply embedded Die Burger is as a brand in its community.”
One of the key aspects that connects the paper to its readers, says Booyens, is that it is a regional paper – rather than a city paper – that distributes as far north as Upington and Port Nolloth and past Port Elizabeth – and covers issues in these areas too.
Die Burger understands, he says, that many of its readers – even those in Cape Town – have roots in and a connection to the country areas.
“If it rains in the Oosterberg, Die Burger is glad on behalf of its readers. It understands the soil as it were.
“Die Burger’s almost like (retired TV-news anchor) Riaan Cruywagen. People don’t mind hearing bad news as long as they hear it from Riaan Cruywagen. Die Burger has been a witness to many things and a prism – and it has broken news to them in a way that has made it acceptable.”
Booyens says another thing that made a big difference is that the night office – which used to be removed from the newsroom – moved back last year.
“I think we’ve re-established the newsroom and the feeling that there is a sense of common purpose… I do think that the physical fact that everybody sits together has had a marked affect,” he says.
A distinctive feature of Die Burger under Booyens is its consistently excellent design and very accessible infographics – a product of Booyens’ collaboration with the chief sub plus getting the newsroom to think visually.
Booyens says he think the emphasis on visual has made the jobs of the journalists more fun – and given them more direction. 
“If something significant happens then everybody runs in all directions and there is a huge spasm for news gathering. I do think what Die Burger has learned is the discipline to do the news gathering but meet the story half way – with a few people closing a door and asking: ‘Right, exactly how much space do we have? What will go on what page?’ Every time we’ve done that, it’s led to clarity and calmness. If someone in the field knows they have 500 words, it helps them to know what they need to get there.”
Booyens believes that covering the Oscar Pistorius story that dominated every media platform in the country for weeks really helped the paper to crystallise thinking about where newspapers best fit in.
“I think in the past three or four months we have really understood that – and this sounds harsh – we are not interested in what is happening today. We are interested in what happens in Touws River tomorrow morning.
“For decades, journalists instinctively understood what news was,” Booyens says, “but these days you can’t make that assumption. In our case (as a newspaper), you have to really think about what people will hear on the radio when they drive home, what they will see on seven o’clock news and what they will hear tomorrow morning by the time they get their newspaper? It’s basically about developing second and third angles and being more interpretative.”
What does the fact that Die Burger’s website – with sister titles Volksblad and Beeld – went behind a metered paywall in April mean for Booyens as an editor?
He believes that Afrikaans news is gravitating towards a more premium offering – rather than being fast and first with the news. “I think it will gravitate towards being exemplary journalism or, otherwise, people will find the news by default elsewhere.
“So I’m all for the paywall and really looking forward to shifting the news towards very premium, which doesn’t mean highfalutin. It means being very clear about what it is that we want to communicate and being very clear about who we are communicating with.
“I think the challenge ahead is for the marketing and advertising people (of newspapers) to really understand what the digital future is going to be demanding from them because it’s just not the rate card/LSM 8 approach that will sustain us.”
Booyens also talks about the shift in thinking of newspapers’ “readership” (of a print edition) to “audience” that is reached across multiple platforms.
“While my job is to maintain the circulation and I do think we are taking baby steps in the right direction,” he says, “at the same time I think that as a newspaper and as a company we are doing well online by having really smart people working on our apps and really smart people developing what we could ultimately sell as a total audience.”
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.