by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) In this punishing media market of falling circulation, you really have to hand it to the newspapers that have arrested the decline.
Times Media Group’s The Herald in Port Elizabeth is one of a clutch of daily papers in South Africa that have achieved this (the others are the 
Sowetan and Die Burger), which is no mean feat for editor Heather Robertson as the Eastern Cape’s biggest city is a hotly contested market.
The Herald – with its newsroom now merged with sister Saturday title, the Weekend Post – has to slug it out with Media24’s Son and Die Burger’s Eastern Cape edition because many newspaper readers in PE are comfortable reading in English and Afrikaans. The Daily Sun (also owned by Media24) and fellow Times Media titles such as The Times and the Sowetan have also made inroads in the market.
Nevertheless, the most recent ABC figures – for the first quarter of this year – put The Herald’s total circulation at 23 372 compared with 23 568 in the same period of 2012.
The drop of about 200 papers for The Herald equates to stability in a devastating quarter when other dailies reported large losses, most notably the Daily Sun that lost 20% of circulation, The Star which fell 14% and the Pretoria News that shed 12%.
And this is not a new trend for The Herald although the paper would have done well out of its excellent coverage of the PE-based family of Reeva Steenkamp, the slain girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius, in the first quarter. For most of last year, the paper was either stable or sales were slightly up.
In addition, The Herald has also been winning journalism awards such as the “hard news” category in the recent Standard Bank Sikuvile awards – not easy for a regional paper with a small newsroom.
Robertson attributes this happy turn of events to a couple of things:
1. Her editorial has stabilised since she took over in August 2010 and coalesced into a team. (It’s not easy attracting experienced journalists to work in the Eastern Cape so you have to grow quite a few of them yourself.)
2. There is a weekly meeting of herself, the head of circulation, marketing manager, advertising and general managers to study the circulation trends, share information and plan ahead, for example, identifying areas where there should be more postering or street sales or special editions and wraps. “We put the pressure on ourselves,” Robertson told Grubstreet. “We do not want to see a newspaper that was started in 1845 dying. We want to survive and be relevant today and into the future.”
3. The paper’s focus on core strategic areas such as local government, crime and court reporting is paying off.
“We take local government very seriously,” said Robertson. “Where the Daily Dispatch (a sister Times Media paper in East London) has a much broader reach and I envy them for that, we are very much a metro newspaper and we don’t have that wide stretch of the Eastern Cape that the Dispatch has or the proximity to Bhisho (the provincial government capital that is half an hour’s drive from EL.)
“Our strength is to be local so we’ve really got to the bottom of what’s going on in this municipality to the extent that we are respected across the board – by the ANC and the opposition – but also hated across the board, which I think is a good space to be.
“Despite all the competition in our market and from online, we are concentrating on basic, solid journalism – not on ideas that pop up in your head – but on building real contacts and it’s about the talent that we have here, growing them and giving them the space to explore their own passions.”
There is a staff member tasked with looking after long-term investigations for the paper, she said, and a reporter who reports the longer-term stories.
Robertson said that when she took over the editorship, she commissioned research into why the paper’s circulation was declining.
“I needed to find out why from the readers… The view from the research was that The Herald was considered to be 1). A white newspaper; and 2). A very suburban newspaper. A lot of black people in PE were falling out of our daily net.
“Six months after I started we had a massive brainstorm among the staff to get them to understand who the target audience is, what is it that they are interested in, what is it that they would like to be reading about, how should we be telling stories. The key is to tell stories in a way that is accessible and compelling and to use good visuals.
“I envy the Media24 titles with their graphics people. We don’t have that,” Robertson said. “We have a very young team but they are very keen.”
The paper – which was redesigned in March 2011 to make it more visual and accessible – has, in fact, grown its black readership so that it now makes up 60% of the total.
The signs of growth started coming in 2012, Robertson said.
The next challenge is how to grow circulation – and Robertson believes the key will be to deliver more hyperlocal news in strategic ways, more news through cellphones (the paper doesn’t have a mobisite yet or apps) and to build on engagement with the readers.
“I think the one thing we do very well is stay in touch with our readers,” she said. “We have one of the biggest letters pages (in SA papers). We have a full letters page every day and between 30 and 50 SMS comments on stories every day. We have a really vibrant Facebook site (while the majority of the paper’s content is behind a paywall on its website) and we are on Twitter.”
The Herald’s Facebook page has more than 16 700 members and its Twitter account has more than 4 800 followers.
Just because there is an online paywall, Robertson said, doesn’t mean the newsroom isn’t integrated. The philosophy is that the paper’s unique content is not given away for free but aggregated content goes online.
Further, if a story breaks the reporter will do it for online that day and broadcast it via social networks but they must give “the depth, the interviews, the why, the motive for the next day (in the paper)”, Robertson said.
There is no online editor at The Herald but everybody works for online and print, Robertson said.
“That’s what’s so much fun. At bigger newspapers everything is segregated. My colleagues at The Times, for instance, have nothing to do with online and yet it’s such an exciting part of the news.
“But what is most important for us is that we are a local newspaper and we must never lose sight of that and of the people we serve… If there is a big, national news story like Pistorius we’ve got to localise it and identify that unique angle that is relevant to our people.”
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.