by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) It was odd that the appointment of Reggy Moalusi as editor-in-chief of the Daily Sun and Sunday Sun in October 2014 didn’t get more attention in media circles.
This is the mighty Daily Sun after all — the biggest daily in the country with 260 000 circulation and 5.3-million readers. But the Daily Sun has always been largely ignored by the middle class and elite in this country, not just because it serves the man in the blue overalls – but because it is a rambunctious tabloid filled with tales of tokoloshes, zombies and muti.
Now Moalusi must lead this beast – and at a difficult time as both papers have been hit very hard by the economic downturn, with many of its working-class readers opting to share copies of the paper than buy their own.
Spurred by serious disruptions in its distribution network due to a new CRM system put in place by owners Media24, the paper’s circulation started falling in early 2009 after reaching a record 500 000 in 2007. This year the Sunday Sun has been showing signs of turning around circulation decline but it’s not there yet. In the most recent ABCs – for the third quarter of this year – the Sunday Sun was at 166 814 compared with 176 692 year on year and 177 304 in the previous quarter. The Daily Sun was at 262 431 total circulation compared with 291 132 year on year and 274 165 in the previous quarter.
“We used to see in one taxi everyone had a copy of the Daily Sun,” Moalusi told Grubstreet. “Today we see more and more, people passing the paper from one person to the next.
“People go to the spaza shop or to the corner store and they say to themselves: ‘If I’m going to buy this paper for R3, then I don’t have a carton of milk or a loaf of bread. What is my priority here?’ And food will always come out on tops. That’s the economy of the stomach – that’s what it comes down to in the end.
“Money’s tight and unemployment is hitting our blue-collar readers in the townships and the rural areas hard. There are people with no disposable income – or no income at all.
“It’s been a challenge for us,” says Moalusi, who has been with the Daily Sun for nine years. “We just need to keep on doing what we are doing and hopefully the economy returns.”
Moalusi, who was previously deputy editor of the Daily Sun, must also make his mark on the two papers, which besides the short-lived tenure of Mazwi Xaba in 2012, have been without an editor since Themba Khumalo left shortly after the death in September 2011 of legendary founder and publisher Deon du Plessis. (Today Jeremy Gordin is the publisher.)
“Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to work with Deon and Themba,” Moalusi says. “Since Deon’s death and Themba’s departure, the mix in terms of the news content has been the same. The kind of mark I’d like to make is to look at the content and how we can strengthen it and take it further – how we can be more in your face and how we can bring back lost readers.
“No one can really fill Deon’s shoes. He was giant and he was very clever – really intelligent. Look what he did for this paper after he founded it (in 2002). I would never sit here and say I want to be the next Deon. No one can ever be like him. The onus is on me to work hard and try and achieve what I can and be the kind of leader I want to be for the paper.”
And what kind of leader is that?
“I’m an open-door policy kind of guy,” Moalusi told Grubstreet. “I don’t impose decisions on people and I consult with people. When I chair news conferences, I consult quite a lot in terms of what stories we have. But when decision have to taken, they must be taken.
“It’s very open how we do things and how we interact with each other (at the paper) and that goes back to Deon. We don’t like to keep people in the newsroom in the dark. We like to tell them the good news and the bad news. And we like to tell them now and then they’re doing a good job.”
How does Moalusi aim to strengthen the content mix?
“Look, the content has always been entertaining so the tokoloshe is definitely not going away. Muti stories are not going away. I think we need to go deeper and deeper into the kind of issues facing our readers in townships, where there are service-delivery protests.
“When you look at (coverage of) the protests, they are generalised in most cases. But if you go deeper and start asking questions, you find out the issues are different from one area to the next. These are the kind of stories we need to be breaking and following up but obviously we either have to upskill the reporters we have or we have to get more experienced and in-your-face reporters out there.”
Moalusi is pleased, for instance, with the recent Sunday Sun splash about controversial SABC chairman Ellen Tshabalala and her relationship with President Jacob Zuma.
Moalusi believes that there are still legs left in the tabloids as print products in South Africa (although the Daily Sun also has a thriving mobisite).
“If you look at all the tabloids we have in SA, people buy them for different reasons… you go to Cape Town and look at what the Daily Voice and Son cover. They cover two hugely different audiences and different issues. If you’re in Joburg you have the Sowetan, which still has lots of political reportage in it; and the Daily Sun doesn’t. I think the (tabloid) reader is spoilt for choice.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet. This piece was published first on Journalism.co.za, the website of Wits University’s journalism school.
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