Notice anything about today’s front pages of The Star, Cape Times and The Mercury? They all played last night’s crucial Bafana World Cup game exactly the same!

I know the papers’ owner, Independent Newspapers, has created a centralised subbing operation in order to contain costs in these straightened times but, bloody hell, where is the personality of the various editors and the papers on this hugely important story?  Nowhere — it looks to me like the subs were left to deal with it.

I presume, unlike most editors in SA who stayed at the office last night to watch the big game and decide on the front page afterwards, the eds of The Star (which is based in Joburg), Cape Times (of Cape Town) and the Durban-based Mercury went home. Interestingly, the Independent-owned Pretoria News seems to have bucked the trend and done its own thing.

I truly hope the editors didn’t hand it over to someone else but it does look that way.

I’d welcome it if any of the above eds told me I’m wrong as I think this extremely uncool.    Call me old fashioned but this is all part of the thrill of journalism: Being in the newsroom to watch the big national event unfolding on TV,  on the wires and being covered by your own reporters and deciding on deadline how to play the story. I think the readers have been let down too as their papers — or what they perceive as their papers — have not put their own thought into this and stamped their own mark on the event.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, new information came to light about how this happened at the Indy. Click here to read and to see how other SA papers played the Bafana exit on their front pages.

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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.

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It’s sure hotting up in Media Land as The Guardian reports that Independent News & Media is trying to extend its financial freeze (for the second time) and that it is using proceeds from the sale of part of a shareholding in an Indian newspaper to pay off the €15m working capital facility that the company secured from its banks when the "standstill"  was first struck in May. Read The Guardian story here.

I’m no financial guru (I do have calls out to a couple and will update you later) but this sounds very, very bad to me. Does this company have any cash flow if it’s selling assets to cover its operational costs?

Meanwhile, Business Day reports that Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of Thabo, says he would love to lay his hands on the Independent’s SA operations but denies having approached Caxton to put together a potential offer. The paper also reports that Black Management Forum leader Jimmy Manyi told them: “There are many black investors who will be interested in buying the Independent’s local assets. There is no shortage of black investors out there.” Go to the story here.

The Independent’s SA newspapers include The Star, Pretoria News, Cape Times and The Mercury.

I have been pouring over the Independent’s annual results for the year to 31 December 2008 as much was made in response to my weekly Moneyweb column in the comments of the profitability of the Evil Empire’s  SA operation. Now this a layman’s perspective but here goes:

The SA operation is a good earner with excellent margins. It brought in 69.1m euros in operating profit after exceptionals for the year ending Dec 31 2008.  The UK operations (chalking up a loss of 205.4m euros) was an absolute dog and Australasia and Ireland brought in some bucks but their margins look quite low.

My question is what kind of multinational is this that its South African operation is one of the best performers?  We are a tiny media market and then there’s the vagaries of the rand. Surely this in itself tells us the company is in big trouble?

Anton Harber pointed out yesterday on his blog that the Independent have been putting off some massive capital expenditure in SA (in the form of the aging Sauer Street press and its building).

I couldn’t help but notice from the annual results that the exceptional items bill for SA was the lowest of the 4 geographical regions (3m euros).

I think if an attractive offer or two came along, the Irish will consider it gratefully and who knows what Denis O’Brien hopes to achieve out of this but he has said he’s not sentimental about keeping loss-making titles going? 

I also discovered from the results that the Independent empire has been in deep shit since last year. After exceptional items, the company as a whole made a loss of 159.4m euros for 2008 compared with a profit of 195.7m euros in 2007.

Click here to download the company’s 2008 results. The breakdown by region start on page 67. Let me know what you think, guys!

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Newspapers are such fun places to work, filled with cantankerous, creative people who get on each other’s nerves but who also become firm friends for life. Part of this goes back to newspapers’ traditional attraction to curious, oddball personalities who would find it hard to fit into more straightened corporate cultures.

Even though they project the image of respectability these days, most papers are still filled with quirky people. Here’s a great blog on peculiar newspaper traditions by the Daily Dispatch’s editor (who is also my husband), Andrew Trench. Click here to read. He wrote it after being informed of a Dispatch election night tradition compelling the editor to provide whisky and milk for all the sub-editors. That’s hard to beat but I’ve encountered a few merry traditions in my time in newspapers.

At the Cape Times in the the early 1990s, the day wasn’t complete for the news staff without nipping into the press club (and Indian restaurant across the road from Newspaper House) for drinks presided over by the sometimes imperious Di Cassere, a long-time hack at the paper.

As a helper to the Stone sub at the Sunday Times, I would srink into myself with fear as the tyrannical editor Ken Owen would come with the Page One designer Dennis Hands every Saturday night to peer over the shoulder of the poor hapless stripper tasked with doing the front page. Mr Owen (because that’s how we addressed him) would be demanding that things be changed and fiddling about with minute spacing. Dennis, cool as a cucumber, would quietly be easing the way, giving the stripper pointers on how to please the boss.

But the things I remember most fondly are all the little interactions and rituals of everyday office life. Brian MacLean, the Dispatch sports editor, filling the office every lunch time with the smell of fish and chips. Bantering with Lukanyo Mnyanda and Daniel Thole at Business Day until a rather uptight middle manager would pointedly shut her office door in the afternoons to shut out our noise. The way the Dispatch chief sub, Sylvia Haggerty, would take out her crystal ash tray out of her draw at 11.30pm as we marched towards deadline and quietly puff away without anyone saying a word (this just after smoking in offices was outlawed). What a class act!

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