by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) What’s eating City Press so much that its annual editorial strategy meeting last week blew up into a race row that exploded on Twitter and into the mainstream media after an extraordinary email by editor Ferial Haffajee to staff was leaked to The Media Online?
Is it actually a race row or are there other issues at play?
Grubstreet had been aware of unhappiness in the newspaper’s newsroom for quite some time – of mutterings about an “in” group of white people who surround the editor. Certainly the two Twitter celebrities at the paper, political writer Carien du Plessis and former assistant editor Adriaan Basson (made editor of Beeld recently), are as active as Haffajee on the social network in a manner that must be uncomfortable for City Press’ traditional readers: the people who loved the paper for its strong “Black Consciousness” voice – its pride in boldly being a newspaper for black Africans.
In fact, there are many issues at play in the discord at City Press such as a young news desk finding its way, reporters having to adjust to a more mainstream news agenda under Haffajee, professional jealously and a touch of trouble making.
Newsrooms are typically filled with creative, fractious people who talk and gossip and moan. What is unusual here is that it spilled into the public arena, sparked by tweets made last week by Haffajee that attracted attention from the likes of EFF leader Julius Malema and political satirist Chester Missing.
What has struck Grubstreet in conversations this week about this saga with City Press staff members, past and present, is that there is nobody in particular to blame in this newsroom: not the editor who is an accomplished journalist hired with a mandate to take on the Sunday Times; nor the newsroom staff – pre- and post-Haffajee – who are struggling with the stresses of transformation.
And by this, I mean commercial transformation.
When Haffajee took over City Press from the well regarded Mathatha Tsedu in July 2010 she was given a very clear brief to take the paper upmarket and to broaden the reader base beyond black Africans. In a 2010 interview a few months after she took over, she told me:
FERIAL HAFFAJEE: My brief from the board is very clear. They want to reposition City Press while retaining that which the readers like. So we want to move it up the market; not right into the Financial Mail/Mail & Guardian space at all – but to play in about LSM (Living Standards Measure) 7-10. At the moment we’re spread into LSM 5 and up to 10.
QUESTION: But that is into the Sunday Times’s territory, isn’t it?
ANSWER: Yes, I guess so. Together with Rapport (the Afrikaans Sunday broadsheet owned by Media24) it’s quite a clear strategy to be competitive but you’ve got to see the two working together.
QUESTION: What fascinates me as you have a hugely challenging task that, if you pull off, will be quite a thing. Can you reposition and retain the 200 000 sales that you already have. I would imagine many of the readers are quite conservative and identify with City Press’s distinct Africanist identity very strongly. At a certain point, won’t you have to kiss some of them goodbye?
ANSWER: I think that is the brief as well: knowing that we are going to lose some readers. I’d like to not lose too many of them because in various readership surveys, there’s a real love relationship between its readers and City Press. In that way, it’s the same as the M&G… something that you carry with pride and you identify with very, very closely.
But I do recognise that in pulling the paper along to where my brief needs it to be, we are going to lose some readers.”
This is a massive undertaking for any product and it’s little wonder that City Press is showing the strain – even more so because we are yet to see signs that the new strategy has found traction in the market.
Most newspapers today are suffering declining circulation and, when you reposition, you expect to lose readers before you find new ones but City Press sales are really not in a good way.
In the latest ABCs – for the second quarter of 2013 – total circulation was at 120 666 compared with 146 054 in the same period the year before. In the same period in 2011, it was at 149 568 while in 2010 it was at 167 467.
By comparison, Times Media Group’s Sunday Times was at 422 869 in the second quarter of this year compared with 452 785 a year earlier.
In the latest Amps readership figures – for July 2012 to June 2013 – there was a large gap between the Sunday Times, with its 3.65-million readers, and City Press with 1.98-million.
The big circulation drop from 2010 to 2011 can largely be attributed to the disastrous new Cycad distribution system introduced by Media24 for all its titles at that time while City Press’ repositioning will have also entailed the difficulties of establishing a new distribution footprint and marketing to new readers.
What is going on this week and last at City Press is that the newsroom staff – especially those that were there under Tsedu and previous editors – are questioning the new strategy and this has become entwined with sensitivities about race, partly because of City Press’ change from a black African product to one targeting a broader audience.
We shouldn’t forget that Haffajee has done good by City Press.
The paper is an agenda setter of national news, has won big investigative awards, is one of the best-looking papers around and has a pretty cool magazine launched a couple of years back.
I do wonder though of the wisdom of taking on the Sunday Times – which is the Big Daddy of Sunday papers in SA in terms of sales and influence – by trying to be like the Sunday Times.
I think City Press needs differentiation – and by giving up its “Distinctly African” ethos (the paper’s old logo), it gave up its key differentiation.
I’m pretty sure that allegations of racism and lack of transformation will be separated from other causes of upset at City Press in the company probe announced by Media24’s head of newspapers Fergus Sampson late last week and there will be a toenadering.
I think the powerful Sampson will support his editor in defending her implementation of her mandate but I think she’ll be censured for taking this into the public arena.
No publisher likes to see the dirty laundry aired in public – especially not Media24 on issues of race. It is sensitive about its own struggles with its transformation from the old Nasionale Pers, the Afrikaans mouthpiece of the apartheid government, to a media company of the democratic era.
South Africa’s leading media commentator Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.