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“Harder than hard”: Iron Lady front pages across the world

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) It’s all about Margaret Thatcher today on most of the front pages of newspapers across the world so I thought it would be interesting to survey some of the big papers from around the globe.

The Daily Mail’s poster pic of the Iron Lady with the headline “The woman who saved Britain” says so much about that doggedly conservative paper while a similar treatment by The Guardian with the quote “She became harder than hard” speaks volumes for its liberal, working-class stance and history.

I really like The Guardian’s treatment because I think it goes beyond ideology. It pays tribute to the massive effect Thatcher had on Britain but also projects the paper’s view that she tore the guts out of the country.

How the Eskom-Billiton pricing discount story was exposed

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) One cannot overestimate the significance of Sake24’s recent PAIA win in the Bloemfontein Supreme Court of Appeal that forced mining giant BHP Billiton to reveal how much of a power discount it was getting from Eskom for two of its aluminium smelters.

This was a long court battle – almost four years’ long – and the outcome sends out a strong message that if a journalist – or a member of the public – requests information involving the state and a third party, the request cannot simply be refused on the grounds that the third party can expect some measure of privacy.

“The ruling shows that the public’s right to access information can trump commercial secrets,” media attorney Willem de Klerk, who represented Sake24 in the bid, told Grubstreet last week. “It shows that large corporations doing business with state entities may expect their commercial dealings to be placed under the spotlight.

Smile 90.4fm aims to shake up Cape Town radio market

by Gill Moodie. Last week Smile 90.4 fm – Cape Town’s new FM radio station – started broadcasting.

Inflation Watch figures show the march of DStv in ad wars

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) The big story of the recently released Inflation Watch figures from Ibis Media Data Services for 2012 is the march of Naspers’ pay-TV giant DStv.

The media inflation figures – that measure the cost of reaching consumers by buying adverts in the media – go out to Ibis’ subscribers, which are mostly in the advertising and marketing industries. The data includes media delivery (performance in terms of print circulation, radio listenership and TV viewership) and value (the “Media Inflation Watch” or “MIW”, that is, performance versus the ad rates).

The recent figures compare those of 2012 to that of the previous year, 2011.

Bearing in mind that new weighting measures were introduced to RAMS and TAMS (that measure radio and television audiences) in the third quarter of 2011 so that the only real trend measure for these sectors is the Rate Index rather than the performance-linked MIW, Ibis said that television ad rates were up by 1.82% .

Highbury Safika on Ramsay, SA Sports Illustrated and more

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Highbury Safika Media is a publisher that flies largely under the radar.

Sure, we’ve all heard about controversial rugby writer Mark Keohane – who resigned from Highbury last year – and of it’s most high-profile consumer magazine, SA Rugby, but although it’s a similar-sized company to Associated Media and RamsayMedia we don’t know too much about it. This is probably because a lot of what it does is custom publishing such as for the Foschini Group.

However, the Cape Town-based company was in the news recently when MarkLives revealed that Highbury and Ramsay – the publishers of Car, Getaway and Popular Mechanics – were in merger talks last month.

This month Highbury CEO Kevin Ferguson told Grubstreet the talks were off (and he confirmed it again this week after Ramsay said the talks were still on the table).

He also told Grubstreet why the company was happy to have a low profile, why it’s taken so long to launch a website for SA Rugby and why he thinks Media24’s Sports Illustrated could have avoided shutting up shop.

Tim du Plessis on how the JSE rule change is hitting Sake24 hard

We’re only just more than two months into the year and we are already seeing the effects of the change to the JSE rule governing the publishing of financial notices.

BDFM’s Business Day completed a round of voluntary retrenchments in January in which 32 people took packages from editorial, sales and marketing while Tim du Plessis, head of Media24’s Afrikaans newspapers, told Grubstreet recently that Sake24 has reduced its editorial positions from 33 budgeted jobs to 24, effective from April 1, through a combination of retrenchment and scrapping of vacancies and transferrals.

“We’re adjusting as it’s a small team but, you know, business news in Afrikaans is important to quite a lot of our readers,” Du Plessis said. “Readers in Jo’burg and Cape Town don’t pick up Beeld and Die Burger to read business news in the same way that people don’t pick up Business Day to read sports news. But it’s important. They want it there and it’s got to be well presented.”

Fast-to-change SA consumer mags are thriving

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Why is it that consumer magazines consistently outperform our newspapers in circulation figures these days?

Not that it’s plain-sailing for the magazine industry, as we saw in last week’s release of the fourth-quarter Audit Bureau of Circulations of SA (ABC) figures for 2012.

Just like newspapers, many magazine titles are suffering sales decline but it’s not across the board – there are more than a handful that are bucking the trend and some that are doing very well.

Take a look at these three graphs showing how consumer magazines have done over the past four years compared with daily and weekend newspapers. There is a slump in consumer magazines in the last half of 2012 but it is very different from the consistent downwards trend suffered by newspapers over the past four years.

Aki Anastasiou on Pistorius, Twitter and what social networks mean for media

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) If, like me, you’ve been mesmerised by the explosion of tweets on the “Oscar Pistorius” hashtag around the Paralympian’s bail application hearing, then you’re just as fascinated with Twitter – and how it is changing how we cover and consume news – as myself.

Last Friday – the day after Pistorius was arrested after shooting dead his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, I wrote this piece about Beeld being the first to tweet the breaking news and wondering about the role of Talk Radio 702 tech expert Aki Anastasiou in how the news went viral in the Twitterverse.

Who is Dr Iqbal Survé – future owner of Independent Newspapers?

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Who is Dr Iqbal Survé, the man who is about to become South Africa’s newest media proprietor if the sale of Independent Newspapers goes through?

Yesterday it was announced that the Irish owners of Independent Newspapers had agreed to sell their South African division to Sekunjalo Independent Media Consortium led by Survé for R2-billion.

The deal, said a story in Business Report, is still subject to the final agreement being signed by both parties, shareholder approval by the Irish owners and approval by the Competition Commission.

Independent Newspaper is the biggest collection of English newspaper in the country and includes The Star, Cape Times, Cape Argus, The Mercury, Daily News, Pretoria News as well as publishing phenomenon, the isiZulu Isolezwe.

This is not Survé’s only venture into media ownership and Grubstreet revealed last week that his company, Sekunjalo, was backing a new medium-wave radio station for Cape Town, Magic AM.

Conflict at The Sunday Times: why Ray Hartley resigned

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley resigned from the flagship Times Media Group (TMG) newspaper, Grubstreet can reveal, because of conflict over the paper’s editorial direction with TMG MD Mike Robertson.

Two well placed sources have told Grubstreet that Hartley and Robertson – a previous editor of the Sunday Times himself – had been at loggerheads for some time.

Grubstreet approached Robertson for comment on Friday and today but he has not responded. We will update with his comment should it come.

While Hartley himself would not comment on the claims, staff members at the paper say one of the flashpoint issues was the future of one of the sections of the newspaper.