by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) It was the story that all the editors feared the most.
For the past couple of years – and especially last year as Nelson Mandela’s health steadily deteriorated – South Africa’s editors 
waited, prepared and planned for when the father of the nation would pass on.
Websites were made in advance, obituaries written and supplements put together — even printed ahead of time in the case of The Witness in Pietermaritzburg.
Still, most were dreading it because they knew it would be one of the most challenging, extraordinary stories of our time. It would require deep thought and an accurate reading of the public mood. It would also demand superb management because of the less-than-communicative Zuma presidency, a feuding Mandela family, the massive security cordon to be thrown up around Mandela’s home, Qunu in the Transkei, and the huge international press corp that was to descend on our shores.
Looking back at those remarkable 10 days of official mourning between the death of Mandela and his funeral in Qunu, what were the main challenges and how do they think they fared. To be sure, many are relieved that it’s over.
“I don’t think anyone in our newsroom has ever worked that hard,” says Katy Katopodis, group editor-in-chief of Eyewitness News that serves Talk Radio 702, 94.7 Highveld Stereo, 567 Cape Talk and 94.5 KFM. “When I look at that time I cannot comprehend that it was only 10 days. It feels so much longer to me. One day was just melting into the next… People were tired towards the end. We were very stretched.”
“We had all these plans dating back to I don’t know when,” says Bongani Siqoko, editor of Mandela’s home-town newspaper – the Daily Dispatch – that circulates in East London and the Transkei. “And yet when Zuma made the announcement, it was almost unreal.
“My heart was actually torn,” Siqoko told Grubstreet last week. “I was looking forward to it as a journalist but I also knew that
managing it would be very difficult. Deploying your resources was difficult – there was so much involved – and there was the pressure that came with it. Secondly, you didn’t have time to actually grieve. You wanted to be part of what was happening, to go outside and join the people who were singing but you couldn’t: you had to remain here and tell the story of how South Africans were grieving.”
After the rush of changing pages for a new edition of the paper on the Thursday night that Mandela died, Sikoqo said he told his staff the next morning: “This story is different. It’s like no other story that you’ve covered before and we have an opportunity to do this and do it well, the opportunity to cover history.
“As Mandela’s home-town paper, we had to take leadership on this story,” he says.
The Dispatch already had a four-person team in Mthatha in the Transkei (though one was in Cape Town and had to fly back immediately). In addition, on the night of the announcement reporters were despatched to the key places of Mandela’s life — to his old school, Healdtown, for instance, and university, Fort Hare – while more reporters and deputy editor Brett Horner made their way to camp out in a school in Qunu, arranged as a rental ahead of time.
Siqoko feels the Dispatch could have done better in reporting the story online but he is very happy with the print coverage — in part because his reporters made a concerted effort ahead of time to build relationships in the Qunu area, with ordinary people, the royals and the Mandela family.
Although the Mandela edition on the Friday after his death only got to the Transkei — a key circulation area for the Dispatch — in the afternoon, the paper still picked up an extra 11 500 sales that day. Sales throughout the period of mourning were also good, says Siqoko, telling us that in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape there was no Mandela coverage fatigue.
Katopodis said that no point did she seriously consider pulling back from the story. “I knew this was the biggest — if not the only news story for those 10 days — because there was always something happening. There was never a quiet day when we thought of leading with something else.
“At one point I was thinking of our listeners and our online news and wondering if it was too much. But I always consoled myself
with the thought: ‘This is history unfolding before our eyes and we have a duty and a responsibility to do this well, for ourselves and for our audience.”
In Johannesburg, Mail & Guardian editor-in-chief Chris Roper could gauge from the website’s stats that the appetite for Mandela coverage never dissipated throughout the week. Incredibly for December — which is traditionally a low traffic month in SA — the M&G’s website netted 1.3-million unique users compared with the other monster month of 2013: February, when the storm of the Oscar Pistorius murder brought in 1.1-million uniques.
The Mail & Guardian, a weekly that comes out Fridays, had the toughest set of circumstances on the night of Mandela’s death as it goes to bed at 6pm every Thursday. It was too late to recall the trucks so they put two newspapers out the next day. All the staff came back to work that night at midnight, Roper said, and did an entirely new paper. They changed the first 16 pages and it was finished by 4am.
“It got very confusing to manage that (two different editions) in terms of the customers but, of course, we had to do it,” says Roper.
The M&G pushed its day-to-day coverage to its website, which also involved a massive Mandela tribute site built two years ago and containing everything the paper had ever written about Mandela.
“The big challenge was differentiating ourselves from the noise and part of how we did that was having a long history of coverage that was already digitised — and there was a lot of it. (In print) we went the “looking-forward” route: how it would affect the elections coming up.”
The Sunday papers had a very tricky job that week because the saturation of coverage meant it was very hard to come up with something special on the two Sundays during the mourning period.
Rapport editor Waldimar Pelser told Grubstreet that he had thrown out a lot of prepared copy, cutting them from 20 broadsheet 
pages to about 10.
“In June, we had a discussion about what kind of piece we wanted for Nelson Mandela’s death. What I wanted was a piece like Nancy Gibbs wrote for Time magazine on the 9/11 attack. She wrote this incredibly emotional piece about what it meant for the US and what it did not mean, and tried to put her finger on the pulse of nation that had gone through massive trauma. We wanted someone who could stand back a bit and really assess the state of the nation and speak to Afrikaans people in particular.”
Rapport asked 80-year-old author PG du Plessis to write the piece and he turned in 1 600 words.
Says Pelser: “What he said — and we extracted this for our cover — was: ‘We locked him up. The Afrikaner locked him up because we were afraid and yet he did not hate — therefore, we should also not hate’.”
There was no headline and this extract was overlaid on a powerful picture of mourners outside Mandela’s Houghton home that wrapped around the entire paper. (The lead inside the paper was also about Mandela’s death.)
The paper did 10 to 12 special pages of Mandela — with Du Plessis’s piece in the middle as a spread — and the rest of the paper was hard news.
“We were happy with our prepared coverage but there wasn’t too much of it, which is very important,” Pelser says. “And for the hard news, there was just enough – we took care to add non-Mandela news also to that week’s newspaper…
“It was such a special week and I don’t think we would have done it differently. There are not many moments like this. We were very proud and that front page moved me to tears.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.
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