by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) They started on the same day – June 1 this year – and that’s not the only similarity between Waldimar Pelser, the new editor of Rapport, and Bongani Siqoko, editor of the Daily Dispatch.
Both are young editors and are former news editors; both have studied in the UK (Pelser at the elite Oxford University). Both men are very much of their communities and have all sorts of interesting things up their sleeves.
Crucially, both must try grow circulation in this toughest of times in the newspaper industry.
For Pelser, who has been both a foreign correspondent covering Africa and the news editor of Beeld, that means achieving a balance between having stories that are of interest to readers and those that are in the public interest – and not forgetting about reputation and premium-quality journalism packages.
“Circulation is never the only thing one chases,” he told Grubstreet. “Of course, it pays our salaries and we constantly have to find and organically develop new markets. But if it were the only thing that mattered, you would put on the front page that which aims squarely at the lowest common denominator – and probably push up nudity and sex and alarmist politics. But none of these things, we believe, is really in the interest of our readers or journalism as a trade on even the future of democracy.
“And it won’t sell in the long run. Once you’ve had enough of the eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet with a lot of calories, you become satisfied. You can’t take it anymore. ”
Media24’s Rapport – which was started in 1970 – is one of the biggest-selling papers in the country. However, like many others, it is struggling with circulation decline.
In the most recent ABC circulation figures – for the first quarter of this year – the paper was at 210 675 sales compared with 223 593 in the same quarter of 2012.
There does appear to have been a change in Rapport’s front pages since Pelser took over as editor – there is certainly less reliance on rugby – and he says this is part of a rethink about gauging the value of the paper’s content.
So sports news stories make the front page and the news section but pure sports stories are happier in the sports section.
Sport is still very important in the content mix for Sunday, says Pelser. However, the paper is now really striving to be bold and infused with personality in its presentation of sport.
Hence, the increase of opinion-driven sports writing and a new element in the sports section meant to spark engagement with readers and become a talking point: a 3D-style infographic of a key moment in a big game and how the play unfolded.
“So the bar is very high and it is creeping up,” Pelser says. “But because the bar is creeping up across the board and because people’s perception of value is changing, the same thing is happening to other sections of the paper.”
Under Pelser, the various sections are being revamped – but in isolation from each other – for this key reason: “For a long time we’ve believed that the value of the paper needs to be equal to the cover price, which is a very dangerous fiction,” Pelser says, “because this can only be so if every reader reads 100% of that package.”
Because some readers read only one or two sections of a paper amid their busy Sundays, each section must be worth the read on its own.
“We can’t risk someone reading something that is not worth R15. So that’s why we’re having a rethink of bundling and the value proposition because people’s time is very valuable. Our rivals on a Sunday are not other papers. It is going on a picnic or lying in or watching a box-office movie.”
A recent double-page spread feature in Rapport.
Changes to the “Weekliks” (the opinion, features and analysis section inside the paper), for instance, include profile writer Hanlie Retief moving from news to the front of this section, the start of a guest-column slot for what Pelser calls “refreshing new voices” and a double-page spread feature with great display and high-impact pictures.
In the news section, the drive is to be really choosy about the stories – some of which come from the Media24 investigations team – so that Rapport has exclusive stories that one doesn’t find elsewhere.
News pages are also now typically dominated by one longer lead story surrounded by lot of much shorter stories – some only 45 words long that have gained the nickname of the “superkort minibrokke”.
“There must be variety and there must be depth (on news pages),” Pelser says. “A crucial guiding principal is “willingness to pay” in everything we put in, something that people would actually be willing to pay for. Or are we selling ice to Eskimos?
“It sounds like an MBA question but it’s actually a value question: If I am flooded with social media, will I still put my hand in my pocket and pay R15 for what you are giving me on a Sunday?”
For a Sunday paper, Rapport has quite a small newsroom of about 10 journalists in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town so everyone needs to work smart and most senior editors also write.
Doubtless, it helps that Pelser is a former news editor.
“You know how stories are born.” He says, “and crucially, how easy it is not to see a story where a story exists. We all know those very good journalists who come back from a seemingly non-descript event or a press conference and see a very special story. A news editor has to know when someone comes back and says, ‘There’s no story,’ and it’s not the case. And he also has to recognise overselling and overpromising of stories.”
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.