What the revamped website looks like.

Well, blow me down but Business Day has a new-look website — and very pleasing it is too! It often seems to me that Business Day and BDFM in general is treated as the poor step-sister in the Avusa family (BDFM is a joint venture, which means it is owned jointly by Avusa and Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times of London).

So while much attention is lavished on Avusa’s Times Live, Business Day’s website seems to have trundled along in a very low-key fashion for many years. Quite frankly, I find this very odd as Business Day actually has something unique that users out there might well be prepared to pay for: It is the country’s premier business publication and consistently turns out thoughtful analysis and comment on SA’s business and political worlds by experienced writers such as Tim Cohen, Eusebius McKaiser, Dave Mars and Hilary Joffe.

Giving their unique content away for free has always struck me as even odder as it must be culling the circulation of the print publication.  (And, in fact, editor Peter Bruce has said he suspects as much but then why would you listen to him — he’s only the editor.)

But back to the revamped website: it’s more cleanly designed with more white space, bigger font sizes, more thumbnails in colour — generally more lively but also more professional looking. There’s no irritating bells and whistles: the new design gets the job done, which is to convey information to busy businesspeople. It is also much easier to access the blog zone.   Click here to read a blog post by Business Day’s Des Latham on the recent changes.

The general gist of the thinking behind the changes — and Peter Bruce was involved in the redesign — is that the paper’s copy will no longer be fed arbitrarily onto the site but that there will  be more thought given to what should be flagged and how things should be weighted in order to make it more user-friendly. It sounds like someone’s actually being paid to be an online editor. That’s excellent news and well overdue.

The only criticism I have is that it seems slow but I’m sure that’s just the usual bugs and gremlins that come with a redesign and it will all be sorted out soon. Click here to go to the new-look Business Day.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Let me count the ways that we can compare Naspers and Avusa: the bull and the bear; the quick and the dead; diamonds and dogs. The two media companies released their annual results – for the year to March 31 2010 – in the past week, prompting many a smarty-pants media writer such as myself to group the two companies together.

It makes for a dramatic business story because, 15 years ago, the companies were of a similar size but now Naspers is an aggressive multinational that has forged an adventurous and lucrative path into the digital arena in countries such as China and Russia. The sexiest thing you can say about Avusa, however, is that it is the owner of the Sunday Times but even that has lost its cachet. Once South Africa’s biggest paper, that title now goes to the Daily Sun, owned by – you guessed it – Naspers.

So while Naspers seems savvy, Avusa appears shambolic. Naspers is bold and brave. Avusa doesn’t seem to have a plan.

But is it really fair to compare the two? Avusa is actually in the “B” league, same as Caxton, the printing firm and owners of The Citizen and a large number of community papers. Caxton’s financial year-end is at the end of June, so its annual results will be out in about September. Naspers is in the “A” league -and uniquely so in South Africa.

Click here to get a handle on the scope of the Naspers empire that spans the newspapers and magazines of Media24 (such as City Press and Rapport) to MultiChoice in SA and across the continent to Internet operations in Brazil, Eastern Europe and India. Now click here to have a look at Avusa’s company structure, which is SA-based (in fact the company pulled back a few years ago from Africa) and mostly old media: newspapers, book publishing, cinema, book stores and music.

So, separating the two companies out, what do the analysts say about them?….. Click here to read the rest of the column at Bizcommunity.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The Sunday Times, South Africa’s biggest weekend newspaper, has had a wretched couple of years. As it emerged from a series of embarrassing lapses in accuracy, the recession hit and the paper has been battling circulation decline, a fall in its main revenue stream – recruitment advertising – and now competitor Media24 is aggressively going after its market share. I spoke to new editor Ray Hartley, who moved in April 2010 from sister newspaper The Times to take over the hot seat of the jewel in Avusa’s media crown.
Gill Moodie: I don’t know if there’s more news space but it seems to me there are more stories up front (in the first section of the paper) since you took over.

Ray Hartley: I think we want to busy it up but also copy taste very well for what we’re using and what we’re making page leads. And we have slightly more space – not much more. We’ve had some pretty good advertising so the front section has been running at a slightly higher number of pages.

Ray Hartley

Moodie: When I interviewed Mondli [Makhanya, the previous editor] in March, he said the squeeze on news space (due to more advertising in the first section because of a redesign) was one of his greatest frustrations.

Hartley: Yes, absolutely. I think part of [how it looks now] is busying it up – more stories per page. And more potential entry points means less pages you would turn over without stopping, which means a sense that you’re reading more. So that would be part of what I’m trying to achieve.

Moodie I see page three, which is one of the most important pages in the paper, is not just celebrity news anymore. You’ve had some good hard news and human-interest stories there. Is that deliberate?

Hartley: Ja, I think stories have to fight for space. We’re not going to put a celebrity story on page three on principle if it’s a weak one and there’s a good human-interest story that’s going to lose out. The Lolly Jackson story was quite a serious story about the crime underworld connections and so on – we ran that on page three.

Moodie: I was getting rather weary of seeing celebrity stories on page three every week, I have to say.

Hartley: Ja, if it’s gratuitous, it shows very quickly… TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW, CLICK HERE TO GO TO BIZCOMMUNITY, FOR WHOM I WRITE A WEEKLY COLUMN ON MEDIA.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The Poms don’t really like to leave home, which is why you’ll find them seeking out home comforts such as bacon and eggs in exotic climes the world over. And where the Brits go, their newspapers are sure to follow.

And so it is with the 2010 Fifa World Cup, which starts in just over two weeks’ time.

Britain is, after all, a nation that loves to read newspapers. It has no less than 10 national newspapers, which is disproportionally high for a population of 61-million people.

With the legions of British footy fans will come at least one of their newspapers, the Daily Mirror tabloid, which boasts 1.2 million average daily sales in the UK. It will be printed daily in South Africa throughout the tournament and local media house Avusa had been contracted by the Mirror Group to print and distribute the paper.

I spoke to the London-based Allan Rogerson, the pre-press director of Mirror Group Newspapers, and Mark White, the overseas circulation manager (now that gives you an indication of the scale of the paper’s operation!) about the logistics of the operation:

Gill Moodie: Are you guys the only British paper printing in SA during the world cup??

Mark White: As far as we’re aware there’s no other title that’s doing it on the scale that we are and for the duration that we are. Obviously, others are looking at digital print, which is (a case of) pressing a button and five copies get printed out that go to the TV stations or the journalists and that’s it. Nobody is going to the streets, to the hotels or the fan villages, etc, which is what we’re planning to do through (distributors) Allied and Avusa.

Gill Moodie: Where will it be printed?

Allan Rogerson: Avusa Media will be subcontracting some of the printing (to Caxton) as they do themselves (for some of their own publications). We’re trying to be as flexible as possible. We’re still not sure even at this late stage where all our fans are going to be and just how popular the paper’s going be – whether it’s the fans or (British) people that are already over there… We made an arrangement with Avusa that we can print at virtually any print site around South Africa… And we will be printing an amount at those print sites depending on where our fans are and where we can sell… TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY COLUMN AT BIZCOMMUNITY.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The Witness' website

To put up the wall or not… that is the question facing all newspapers today as they wrestle with the online paywall issue. On the one hand, putting all your newspaper’s content on the web for free may well cull the circulation of your physical print product and if you can’t generate enough advertising on your site to even cover its costs, then a paywall seems the best route.  On the other hand, by creating a paywall the number of website users may dwindle to such an extent, that you’ll end up heading off to the digital equivalent of Nowhereville.

This week in my Bizcommunity column, I wrote about Avusa’s plans to put up paywalls on its Eastern Cape titles, The Herald in Port Elizabeth and the Daily Dispatch in East London — possibly in the next three months. This move spells the first of the big three media houses with serious online presences — Avusa, Media24 and Independent Newspapers — to experiment with a paywall.

But the very first South African broadsheet to go this route — albeit with a partial paywall — was actually  The Witness based in Pietermartizburg.

The Witness, which is 50% owned by Media24, blocked access to its unique KZN content (and not to more generic wire copy covering national and international news) in November last year. The aims were modest: to generate enough income to bolster its very small web operation rather than to make loads of profit. Even so the step wasn’t taken lightly and the paper’s deputy editor, Yves Vanderhaeghen who also oversees the online operation, wrote this piece in November explaining the move to the paper’s readers and website users.

This week, I asked Yves for an update on how their paywall experiment was going, six months down the line, and he had this rather heartening message for others about to step boldly into the paywall arena:

Contrary to what was predicted, The Witness’s website traffic has not plummeted into the depths of obscurity. Where there were usually 5500 unique users per day without the paywall, the daily average has dropped and plateau’d at an average of 4100, while the average time on the website has increased from 6 minutes to 13 minutes. There is a measure that some people stay on the website for hours, thus skewing the graph… but this was the same before the implementation of a paid-for subscription system.

Classifieds is still most readers’ port of call on the site (33000 of the 95000 visits last month). The habits of online users still seem to indicate that readers are interested in getting a brief overview of the day’s news – as even articles which are not marked with a ‘P’ (i.e. paid-for content) are not clicked on as much as those marked with a ‘P’.

Comments and feedback have decreased, and now the majority of the comments come in forums of debate (letters, features) rather than as an immediate response to news – which has now been clamped down with the paywall. The plus side is that it has reduced what would often be a wave of obscene comments to an aggravating news story, which would generally need careful pruning, if they were at all usable (swear words, racism, etc).

Now, isn’t this interesting, people?  It seems it’s not all gloom and doom and there is indeed a proportion of people out there in the ether prepared to pay for content. The fact that The Witness still allows free access to the national and international wire copy may be a key part of the puzzle. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on the issue.

Click here to read an earlier column of mine at Moneyweb, in February 2010, about The Witness’ move.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

The great thing about the web is you can always add on to stories after deadline — and that’s what I’m doing here. I wrote a media column for Bizcommunity this week on the many shades if grey that go into the workings of Amps readership figures (the full-year 2009 Amps figures were released by Saarf recently). Click here to read the column.

Unfortunately, I only managed to track down top media planner Gordon Muller after deadline. Muller used to be the MD of OMD, one of the biggest media planning firms in South Africa, and now heads up his own  media consultancy, GSM Quadrant.

I think his insights into Amps are really valuable so here we go, Happy Hacks:

Gill: This week I’m looking into AMPs and how newspapers tend to trumpet their rise in AMPS figures (the Sunday Times this last Sunday is a good example — I’ve attached their press release). But my feeling is it is totally useless to measure a newspaper’s audience by using AMPS alone and that you also need to weigh up their ABC figures to get a more accurate picture.

Gordon Muller

Gordon: If we can’t use AMPS readership figures, then it is no wonder that the print media industry keeps flirting with the idea of producing their own readership survey. Readership figures are absolutely vital to evaluating print media because they provide two things which we cannot get from ABC figures a) Demographic/ Branded/ Even psychographic and attitudinal profiles and b) the metrics we need to calculate reach and frequency which are fundamental pillars of any media strategy.

The problem with AMPS readership figures is the filter used to define readership: (Reading or paging through means that “you personally read or paged through all or part of a copy, regardless of whether that copy belongs to you and regardless of the venue where the reading took place”. Even if I glance at a magazine for 1 second, whilst standing in the CNA, then I am a reader. This leads to the ridiculously high readership levels in AMPS. Sunday Times has 10 readers per copy; Sowetan 12; Daily Sun 10. Daily News has 15 readers per copy . Men’s Health 15 and Drum 19? And all of them with equal value to the advertiser? I don’t think so.

Gill: Also my sense from the newspaper editors I know is that few understand what goes into AMPS, which is rather complex, and therefore don’t really have an accurate idea of how their newspapers are performing.

Gordon: Not sure I agree with this on several levels. AMPS isn’t that complex and most senior editors do know what their readership is. The problem is in not knowing the value of that readership. You can offer me 19 readers per copy but 9 times out of ten , what I really want is to talk to the 1 or 2 primary readers. Publishers have come to the conclusion that more readers, irrespective of where they come from and what they offer advertisers, is better than fewer, targeted readers. That’s where they are confused. If editors don’t know how their titles are performing then they should be speaking to their sales and marketing teams to find out.

Gill: Then you have the odd situation where Media24 really seems to push ABCS while Avusa likes to project AMPS. What, in your opinion, should advertisers be looking for as indicators of value in print titles?

Gordon: It’s not odd at all. It’s media sales and it’s all done with mirrors. You use what you feel places your titles in the best possible light. This actually pertains to an entirely different issue. If you look at Media24, they don’t actually push ABCs at all. What they push is their CORE CIRCULATION. There’s a fundamental difference between total circulation and core. In a nutshell, Media24 is trying to push QUALITY of circulation whilst Sunday Times is trying to push VOLUME of readers. Mazda sells performance and Toyota sell reliability. Who’s right? They both are. It’s about selling what you think is best for your brand.

Gill:  And then the last thing I wanted to bounce off you is that Saarf  believes that more people are reading titles but less frequently based on the AIR figures but they say they don’t deal with the “why” — only the “what”. Why do you think this might be the case?

Gordon: Reading fewer titles makes sense in a recession. There is less money to buy a multi print media mix. This would manifest itself in buying only your favourite title (rather than the 2 or 3 you might have previously enjoyed) or even your favourite title less often.

Click here to go to Gordon’s Khulumamedia blog.

Popularity: 13% [?]

This just in, as they say, Media24 has announced in the most fashion forward way — through Twitter nog al! — that Die Burger has got a new editor: Bun Booysens, who was previously editing the Media24 travel magazine Weg & Go.

Bun is hugely respected in the industry as a very smart news hack and thoroughly decent individual so it seems an excellent appointment. I had the pleasure of having him as a guest lecturer on a Poynter journalism course I did many years ago and thought he was the bee’s knees. He clearly had an excellent nose for news and was very generous with his knowledge – so lucky folk at Die Burger in Cape Town.

It’s a little unclear what Booysens predecessor, Henry Jeffreys, will be doing. According to the Media24  on Bizcomminity (who were the first to pick  up on the buzz on Twitter), Jeffreys will be “keep his ties with the company, writing a regular column for some of the newspapers and lecturing at Media24′s Journalism Academy”.

That’s the academy run by that Mathatha Tsedu, previously the City Press editor and who also did a  short stint as editor of the Sunday Times between Mike Robertson and Mondli Makhanya.  It does suggest that — like Makhanya very recently at the Sunday Times — Jeffreys is being sent quietly on his way to more ephemeral pastures.

I guess the musical chairs at Media24 and Avusa  may well be a consequence of last year’s recession, when many newspapers were hit by declining circulation and a fall in advertising. All media house owners are chastened by the experience and are probably  looking for more bang for their buck when it comes to editors.

Click here to read my previous post on the Avusa reshuffling and here to read Anton Harber’s take on it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Media Land is abuzz with the major reshuffle at Avusa announced today. First up, Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya is to become editor-in-chief of Avusa Media newspapers.  The editor of The Times, Ray Hartley, will be the editor of the Sunday Times and then the editor of Business Times, Phylicia Oppelt, will become the editor of The Times. The latter will both report to Mondli as will all other editors of Avusa Media newspapers, says the group’s press release.

So what’s up at Biermann Avenue? It’s certainly a promotion for Ray Hartley as he gets the jewel in Avusa’s crown though its under circulation pressure, is facing an aggressive play for market share from Media24′s City Press and Rapport and it was hit by a severe decline in careers advertising last year amid the recession. (Click here to read an interview I did with Mondli about the Sunday Times a few weeks back.)

Ray’s appointment is an excellent one: he knows the Sunday Times inside out as he was their very smart political editor and head of news for years before he took over at The Times when it was launched a few years ago. Ray is also a strategic thinker and plays his cards close to his chest so I think we will see the battle for the Sunday broadsheet readers hotting up.

For Mondli, I’m not so sure it’s a promotion. The company’s press release says he will be “charged with setting up and running centres of excellence that will produce unique, original and compelling content for all of the group’s newspapers and websites. In this new role, he would also represent the interests of editors on the Avusa Media management committee”.

I’m skeptical that he will have much to do in his new role. He no longer has a title of his own and the publishing responsibilities of Avusa’s newspapers are taken care of  by CEO Mike Robertson, also a former editor of the Sunday Times, along with various operations chiefs. That phrase “centres of excellence” has a hollow ring to it — much as someone being tasked with looking after “special projects” does.

Phylicia’s appointment is a big promotion and we’ve seen her raising her profile over the past two months with her column at The Times so this is not entirely unexpected as she has long been in Robertson’s inner circle.

What can I say about her taking over at The Times, the daily newspaper given  free to Sunday Times subscribers? Well, dear user, not too much lest I stray into the arena of defamation. I can say I have known her for many years, once counted her as a friend and worked for her in various capacities when she was editor of the Daily Dispatch.  But, let’s see, I can say these complementary complimentary things: she’s ambitious and has an impeccable dress sense.

Popularity: 27% [?]

The Sunday broadsheet newspaper market has become fiercely competitive with Media24’s City Press and Rapport making an aggressive play for more market share on the one hand and Independent Newspapers’ investing in the Sunday Independent for the first time in many years. This puts Avusa’s Sunday Times, the biggest-selling Sunday paper in the country, in the hot seat with serious rivals going after its readers at a time when the paper dropped the ball in being the big agenda-setting newspaper. Last year a succession of weak splashes (that’s hack speak for front-page leads) on top of the recession led to a decline in circulation. But the Sunday Times has come back this year with some excellent splashes, most notably the Zuma Babygate story, “How Malema made his millions” and the Alan Knott-Craig alleged nepotism story. In this last in a series of interviews with Sunday broadsheet editors, I spoke to Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya last week about what went wrong in 2009 and how the paper is now fighting back. (Click here to read the interviews with City Press’s Ferial Haffajee and the Sunday Independent’s Makhudu Sefara.)

GILL MOODIE: Last year must have been a very tough year for the Sunday Times. As we know, you were hit by a downturn in careers advertising because of the recession and your sales declined and then your investigations team of Jocelyn Maker and Megan Power was no more. (Maker left journalism for the tourist industry and Power became the Durban bureau chief.)

Mondli Makhanya

MONDLI MAKHANYA: Definitely… The economic downturn had a major effect – no question about it. On the advertising side, we felt it very, very strongly and we also felt it on the circulation side and the latest ABCs (circulation figures) will tell you that. You know, people had to make choices: ‘Do I pay R14 X four for a newspaper or shall this contribute to my family’s groceries?’ So we felt it. In all my years of editing, that was the roughest year ever. Also, we were recovering from a hectic 2008, in which we made some very serious slip-ups to put it kindly – for instance, with the Transnet story. (The story alleged that Transnet had secretly sold for R7bn 22kms of coast line and 90kms of sea in Table Bay in Cape Town to investors in London and Dubai.)

QUESTION: Except no one’s going to forget the “Manto: a drunk and a thief” splash (in 2007). That was the story of the decade.
ANSWER: Yes, you come off that high of all those investigations – and you’re scoring first – and then we had that front-page apology (over the innacuracies in the Transnet story). It burns you and it dented confidence (in the newsroom) and we brought in that panel (of Anton Harber, Paula Fray, Dario Milo and Franz Kruger to look into problems in news processes and editorial management of the paper). So we’d gone through some pain in 2009. We were coming off the back of these things and we were in recovery mode… it was a hard year. It was a year of rebuilding…. TO READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY COLUMN AT MONEYWEB.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Sunday broadsheet market is hotting up, with both Naspers’s Media24 and Independent Newspapers making aggressive plays for more market share. Media24 now has Ferial Haffajee, the highly regarded former Mail & Guardian editor, at the helm of City Press – and the paper is moving upmarket – while there is a definite change in the wind at Independent Newspapers. Not only does the Sunday Independent have a fulltime editor and deputy editor for the first time in many years but the company has also invested in a group investigative unit and an in-house training unit for young journalists. Last week I spoke to Haffajee and Makhudu Sefara, who took over as Sunday Independent editor five months ago. Here is an edited transcripts of the interview with Sefara:

Click here to go to the interview with Ferial Haffajee.

Click here to go to my Moneyweb column, which this week is about the battle of the Sunday broadsheets.

QUESTION: The Sunday Independent has been the poor step-sister at Independent Newspapers for some time. What did you find when you walked in the door as editor? (Previously Sefara was at City Press and Independent Newspapers.)

Makhudu Sefara

ANSWER: There weren’t many people. The paper had survived on group contributions (from other Independent newspapers and from cross-title units such as the political desk) but we’ve tried to turn things around and propel the paper in a different direction. We are now joined by Mpumelelo Mkhabela from the Sunday Times as the deputy editor and we’ll be getting other new people very soon. We’re putting out the ads… There are great plans to pay much more attention to the title.
The past five months have been quite gruelling… but we’ve seen the numbers increasing. In September last year, our total sales were about 31 000 and going down. We’ve now managed to stop that decline and not only that but to get 4000 new readers since then and the graph is pointing upwards.
I think that’s what it makes it worthwhile… it’s not that this is difficult but it requires quite a lot of time that you don’t always have to deal with the many things that require your attention.
But you see the response that we have received, and you can stop and say: ‘Ja, it’s really worth the fight. Let’s keep on going back there and trying to improve and change things here and there and look at what we don’t provide and how we can accommodate it in the title, where we can get the resources to provide new items’ … Of course, it’s a constant struggle, to look at what works and what doesn’t work, what must be retained and what must be thrown out the window. And if you’re throwing it out, how many readers are going out with it. If you’re introducing something new, to how many people is this going to be relevant. It’s a constant to and fro.
But so far it’s looking good and we’re hoping to maintain the momentum… towards the end of the year, we should be chasing 40 000 to 45 000 (sales).

QUESTION: When the Sunday Independent was started, The Sunday Times had a very clear proposition in that it was the agenda setter of the country and you went to the Independent for the extra stuff – the analysis and the good international copy. Are you guys sticking with this traditional Sunday Independent role when the Sunday Times is no longer consistently setting the news agenda?
ANSWER: I don’t think we need to surrender the battle to set the agenda to the Sunday Times – and to others. What I think we should do is to use whatever resources we can muster on the front page to set our agenda. If you look at the stories we did, for instance, Nathi Mthethwa’s deal and the hotel in Durban, those stories have set the agenda. I’ve gone on a number of radio stations and those stories have continued for a number of days – if not weeks, to be followed up daily papers.
Traditionally, the Sunday Times published their lead and on Monday everyone was following up. They still continue to try to do that but my view is that they are not consistent. There are times when they get a good story like the Jacob Zuma “Babygate” story and the Jacob Maroga R85-million. But if you look at how anybody with resources could have got the Jacob Maroga piece, it’s easy stuff – it’s not something that you can say that only the Sunday Times should do. So we’re going to try to do that.

QUESTION: But do you have enough staff to do that?
ANSWER: I think our (cross-title) politics team is actually the strongest in the country. It has about eight people and politics, for us, has become the mainstay of the paper. So we’re looking at politics, investigations and news breaks on the front page… I’m also very keen on education and health as those are minefields that are not explored properly so when we get more people (at the paper), we’re going direct them into those areas… I’m quite certain there are many stories that are untold, both about the hardships that people experience and the corruption involved in multibillion tenders.
The challenge is to be able to do that and retain the quality analysis of our own national politics and the geo-politics, for example, what’s happening in Greece at the moment.

QUESTION: The Sunday broadsheet market has got so interesting this year, with Ferial Haffajee now at City Press and taking steps to reposition the paper. What do you make it of it?
ANSWER: The paper that (previous City Press editor) Mathatha (Tsedu) put out was a distinctly African newspaper. The paper that Ferial is putting out is a paper that is trying to balance a mix of races. It’s a tough task that she has because she’s trying to downplay politics and introduce new elements. The paper Mathatha produced was by comparison heavy with very few light pieces – and it worked to an extent as the sales went up to about 200 000 but then it stopped growing.
If you’re Ferial, you want to attract mainly people who are reading the Sunday Times to increase your numbers. You need to be mindful not to lose the 200 000 people who are already buying your paper. It’s a balancing act of sorts, an egg dance. It’s a tough task but a very interesting one.
And, if you’re Mondli at the Sunday Times, for example, and looking at what Ferial is doing and what we’re doing at the Sunday Independent – even though we’re coming in with only 31 000 to 35 000 and still counting – you want to ask yourself, if you’re at 500 000 (sales), do you want to increase or maintain this? Are there things that you need to do that you think Ferial is going to do to try to steal readers from you or is City Press going to appeal to other people who not reading the Sunday Times?
So it means Mondli must check constantly what City Press is doing and what we are doing and I’m saying (for the Sunday Independent) that it has not been a year yet. Give us till the end of this year and, hopefully, given the resources that we will get, we will be an entirely different ball game. The paper that we will be putting out will be both setting the agenda and offering readers in-depth analysis on both local and international news in a way that nobody else is going to be able to do.

GILL MOODIE: There is obviously a decision by Independent Newspaper to invest in the paper?
MAKHUDU SEFARA: Ja, for the first time in a long time we now have a fulltime editor and deputy focused on the paper from Tuesday to Saturday – though it feels like from Tuesday to Tuesday — and we will be getting new people and things should improve. It is already much better now than a year ago in terms of staffing.

QUESTION: Last year was a horrendous year for everyone in terms of advertising. How are things are looking for Sunday Independent this year?
ANSWER: This is an interesting story. When the Sunday Independent was founded, the model was to have the paper sustain itself on the cover price,… (The paper cost R12.50 in the third quarter of last year) that it should be able to recoup production costs. As a result they did not employ someone to look after advertising for the paper and when the paper failed to sell the number of copies envisaged, that created problems. It needed to subsidised.
But effective last month, we have now employed someone to look at advertising specifically for the paper. And it is already looking good… She said last week that she had already made her target for this month. So we’re beginning to see the first sun rays to give us hope that this thing can be turned around if you pay particular attention to it… I’m quite confident that in quite a short space of time we will be able to announce that the paper is now viable.

Popularity: 17% [?]