There are many curious things about the launch of the government-friendly The New Age newspaper scheduled for September but chief among them is that the editor, Vuyo Mvoko, is no ANC lackey. He’s a respected political hack (I worked with him at Business Day many years ago) so why, we media luvvies have wondered, would he accept such a position? Well, I interviewed Vuyo yesterday for Bizcommunity about the new job, the paper’s editorial line and what he hopes to achieve. Here are a few excerpts:
Question: You have said you want to have news from all the provinces beyond the major urban areas such as Joburg, Cape Town and Durban. But I can’t see how good news is going to sell in the rural areas such as the Transkei in the Eastern Cape, where people are trapped in desperate poverty and they feel abandoned by the provincial and local governments. Clinics are not staffed properly and do not have the drugs they should; the schools are falling apart…
Mvoko: Look, you would find it hard to convince someone who feels hard done by lack of service delivery. Being at the receiving end of inefficiency or injustice or lack of service delivery hardly makes you receptive to a good-news story because your world is bad. But what we’re saying is that rational thought should form part of any public discourse and give credit where it is due. That is not to say we’re going to tell everybody that everything is hunky dory, thank you very much…And it doesn’t mean we’re going to listen to every politician who says “we’ve done a lot”. We will interrogate those facts…
Question: You might feel you’re a pathfinder but lots of people see The New Age as a government mouthpiece. Aren’t you worried how this position will reflect on you professionally?
Mvoko: I’m not worried. The reality is that each and every editor is under some pressure or the other on a consistent basis. There are people who want to influence you, not just your stories on a particular day but also the direction of your publication…My point is that the whole holier-than-thou attitude (towards The New Age) is not on. The issue for the editor is how you deal with those pressures, how you make sure that at the end of the day you service your reader and speak to the values of your editorial direction. You will lose some and you will win some.
Click here to read the full interview at Bizcommunity.
I believe Vuyo when he says this but, frankly, it is highly unlikely that the Gupta family who is the major shareholder in The New Age’s publishers and is close to the Zuma family, will not want Zuma-friendly coverage and for those in Zuma’s inner circle. Click here to read a May 2010 story by the M&G on the relationship between the Guptas and the Zumas.
Vuyo Mvoko
Of course, Mvoko is right about pressures on editors countrywide but The New Age is quite openly ANC-aligned: besides the Gupta funding, Essop Pahad is on the board of directors, one of Zuma’s son was floating around at the paper’s launch and The New Age name is a resusitation of a 1960s ANC journal.
Mvoko says the paper will be critical of government when its needs to be and the raison d’etre here is to do good news but, let’s face it, when you’ve got 32 pages to fill on a daily basis, all those crime and grime stories will have to be used. The government news agency, BuaNews, is already paid to find happy-camper delivery stories and they don’t come up with more than a handful a day. Then the pressure will really come down on Mvoko’s head so watch that space. I would advise that Mvoko try avoid taking calls from unhappy publishing higher-ups as much as possible. This apparently worked well for Zwelakhe Sisulu when he was head of the SABC.
The other interesting things about The New Age is:
1. The sheer ambition of the project. Conventional wisdom tells us that new newspapers take four to five years to break even so you have to have deep pockets to go the distance. There are plans for 170 000 circulation sold at R3.50 (the biggest paper in the country, the Daily Sun, has taken more than five years to get to about 480 000 sold for R2.30 and they started at a R1 cover price). On top of that there are plans to buy a press, which will be megabucks, and give us overcapacity in the SA printing industry as both Media24 and Caxton have fabulous modern web presses. (Look out Avusa, who has said it is looking for new options beyond its TNPC joint printing venture with the Independent Group in Johannesburg.) Click here for a very good article at The Daily Maverick on the business side of things at The New Age.
2. The fact that The New Age will be an unusual format for SA — the narrower Financial Times format — and is breaking with convention and offering advertising on centimetre square basis as well as column centimetre. I asked a senior media planner if this will prove to be a hassle to advertisers and he said:
With regards the pricing…they will offer two forms of pricing to begin with…traditional column centimetre rates as well as the per square centimetre rate. The square centimetre method does give advertisers more flexibility in terms of sizes, but I don’t know that many advertisers will see it this way. I would think most advertisers would just supply the same sized material that they produce for the other papers anyway. I do think it is going to cause huge confusion though when it comes to advertising agencies’ billing systems and how we load and invoice clients. I think there could quite likely end up being many account queries because the agency understood things to be one way, but the newspaper understands them to be another way. So I think if they proceed in this manner, it will be an interesting first few months until everyone gets their heads around the calculation of rates and ad sizes… They say they adopted the model from The Times of India and that whilst it did cause confusion there for a while, it has become the new standard in terms of how all newspapers there now do business. Time will tell how it will work here.
3. I am getting the sense that The Times of India is a very active strategic partner in The New Age’s owners, TNA Media. The New Age’s IT system is a repilca of theirs, The New Age is adopting advertising measures from them and Mvoko told me that The Times of India’s publisher was in SA about two weeks ago to meet with him and others. The Times of India is a massively successful operation — about 4-million daily circulation — so they certainly know their potatoes when it come to English publications in multilingual developing nations. I think they are the best thing that The New Age has going for him and, who knows, maybe The Times of India’s publisher is looking for a foothold in SA with an eye on our substantial Indian community that is by and large a high-LSM group. In the press release for the paper’s launch, The Times of India’s group CEO, Ravi Dhariwal, said: “We are excited about this opportunity to partner with a new national daily and a young nation. We will work closely with our partners in The New Age to fulfill their commitment to produce a quality broadsheet while empowering the emerging South Africa”.
4. What has also puzzled me is the presence of Essop Pahad, Thabo Mbeki’s minister in the presidency and his main enforcer. What does this mean? Is Pahad looking for political comeback by getting on the right side of Zuma? How fascinating. We shall see what we shall see. Click here for Alec Hogg’s interview with Pahad on his SAfm radio show.
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