Cape Times to relaunch

You heard it here first, media luvvies! The Cape Times is being relaunched soon, says Independent Newspapers’ Chris Whitfield, the editor-in-chief of the Cape Times, Cape Argus, Weekend Argus and the Daily Voice.

Today's front page of the Cape Times.

They are beetling away on a redesign and hope to relaunch just before the World Cup but, as we all know content is king, so the chief focus is to add some pep to the story mix and possibly to appeal to a broader audience than its current high LSM readers.

“We’re hoping to achieve a livelier product, taking into account media trends around the world and more partnership with online,” Whitfield told Grubstreet this week. “We’re looking at the way we write and the beats we cover and having more people in stories. The Cape Times can be fairly dry and we’d like a little bit more humour and levity.

“The Cape Times is a serious newspaper, given its positioning and with its focus on politics and business but I think it can have a broader appeal.”

Whitfield, who was editor of both the Cape Times and Cape Argus before he moved to his current position a year ago, said it wasn’t going to be a shout-it-from the rooftops kind of revamp with parades and balloons.

“We will do some marketing,” he said, “but it is essentially an editorial relaunch aimed at producing a compelling newspaper.”

Whitfield oversees the business management and strategic plan for the four titles, the editorial of which is run by the four executive editors: Alide Dasnois at the Cape Times, Gasant Abarder at the Cape Argus, Janet Heard at the Weekend Argus (Chiara Carter is acting editor while Heard is in Boston on the Niemann Fellowship) and Elliott Sylvester at the Daily Voice.

The plans for the Cape Times sound good to me. Personally, I was a fan of the paper when I lived in Cape Town about seven years ago. The paper was under Whitfield’s editorship at the time and it was a good solid, serious newspaper. A bit of levity would be welcome, I think.

* The most recent ABC circulation figures — from the last quarter or last year — put the morning newspaper at 44 480 average daily sales compared with 46 813 in the last quarter of last year. The Cape Argus, an afternoon paper, was at  58 052 sales (63 169 in the comparable period in 2008) and the Weekend Argus 86 448  (97 446 in the comparable period in 2008). The Daily Voice does not submit figures to ABC.