Will the sun ever set on SAPA?

In the far corner, in Hamburg in Germany, we have some of the brightest media minds and most successful journalists in the world gathered for the annual World Editors Forum last week - where change came up as a constant theme.

In our corner, we have SAPA - or the South African Press Association - the news agency that feeds pretty much every major news organisation in the country and dominates their websites as breaking news (though not necessarily their print titles).

In the spotlight

SAPA, which is essentially a wholesaler of news and, therefore, not well known to the average media consumer, is in the spotlight because editor Mark van der Velden popped up on The Daily Maverick website in a story about reports that ANC Youth League president Julius Malema might step down.

The reports turned out to untrue but not before almost every major newspaper had carried it. Malema, it seems, made an ambiguous statement that Beeld interpreted as him stepping down. It was picked up by The Witness and then SAPA ran a story about The Witness's angle.

Van der Velden made a few eyebrow-raising remarks to The Daily Maverick and seemingly highlighted the fact that the news agency is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant as media houses constantly review their costs, especially since the recession kicked in - SAPA being quite a significant one, as it is not cheap.

But first to Hamburg we go. The World Editors Forum is pretty much the most important powwow of journalists and media executives of the year, at which anyone who's anyone - and even those from far-flung South Africa - navel gazes about the state of journalism, the business and the future (in between quaffing cleansing ales in the pub).

Litmus test of media mood

It is, however, an excellent litmus test for the mood of the media around the world and tells us of about the challenges with which editors, news editors and CEOs are wrestling. (Click here to get a comprehensive picture of what came up the conference at the excellent Editors Weblog website.)

And it was change, change, change that came up over and over again. The New York Times CEO Janet Robinson told the conference, for instance:

"We must be in perpetual beta - we say that and we mean it. You have to be prepared to do things differently... If you don't start looking for new business models and new products and services you provide, you're not keeping your audience devoted to your brand."

Meanwhile, Professor Lucy Küng of the Media Management and Transformation Centre at the Jönköping International Business School in Sweden said we have to ready to fail in order to innovate - and that newspapers need to develop engines of innovation within their organisations. She also said, "Just because we know that a nasty change is coming down the line does not mean that we can get ourselves and our organisations and our strategies in a good shape to deal with it. It is actually extraordinarily difficult for legacy organisation to respond to these kinds of changes." (View an edited video of her remarks.)

Once newspapers reigned supreme

Some would say all change is nasty - it certainly makes one weary - and in the media, practically all the major changes of the past two decades have made life much more difficult for newspapers than for any other form of media. Once newspapers reigned supreme - especially in South Africa where television was kept out till the 1970s. The Argus group, would you believe, had bureaux across the world? Regional newspapers had correspondents throughout their circulation areas.

Now the audience and advertising pie is so splintered that the high cost of producing journalism (did you know that the average daily newspaper contains about 30 000 words - the same as the average novel?) and of printing and distributing the physical product has squeezed margins to the point that scale of operation is vital to survival.

Across the world, and here in SA, we have media houses pooling resources across titles and creating sub-editors' hubs, political reporting teams, investigative journalism units. Some work better than others but the reality is that, in today's world, it makes no sense to duplicate resources.

An obvious area of cost saving is wire agency copy. South Africa's newspapers pay small fortunes for feeds from international agencies such as Reuters, AFP and for syndicated foreign copy from the world's most prestigious newspapers. So, for example, you will notice that the Sunday Times carries copy from The Times of London but no longer that of The New York Times - the latter went out with the recession.

Costs in constant review

Some of these costs are shared across titles, of course, but they are in constant review. Is what we're paying really worth what we're getting, editors and media executives ask themselves - how much of this will the readers miss and can we do it ourselves for cheaper?

SAPA is funded by the member newspapers of the big four - Media24, Independent Newspapers, Avusa and Caxton - but there have been musings from different quarters for many years as to whether it is worth the cost.

Certainly, the scope of the Media24 and Independent groups should make SAPA redundant. Both have newspapers in the three major cities: Joburg, Cape Town and Durban. Caxton has only The Citizen in Johannesburg (its community titles would be hard pressed to contribute to a group wire) and Avusa is strong only in Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape.

Even so, how much news from Parliament in Cape Town, for instance, do The Citizen's readers actually want? Copy could be bought piecemeal and the paper already outsources its business pages to the Moneyweb website, so there is a different model in the making there

Precursor?

Avusa, meanwhile, has appointed Charmain Naidoo, the former editor of The Herald, to head up the creation of the Avusa Media News Service. A precursor to pulling out of SAPA? Possibly, but it remains to be seen whether a traditional newspaper environment can really get the agency mindset right - of getting things out as fast as possible and giving up ownership of stories so that everyone can share in the spoils.

The thing the media houses would miss the most is the wide-ranging sports copy and especially sports results but does this mean the sun will never set on SAPA?

News agencies around the world are aware of the threat they face, which is why at the World Editors Forum, Chris Ahearn, the president of media at Thomson Reuters, was banging the change drum himself. He told the conference, "We live in a publishing world that's so dramatically different. The old business model is dead, it's kaput. We have to move faster, we have to move more boldly".

He also said that Reuters was developing "something for you to distribute your content". It will be built around news organisations' preferences, Editors Weblog reported, encourage more original reporting rather than regurgitation, and will allow organisations to save money and resources.

Should be so lucky

What Ahearn didn't do - unlike SAPA's Van der Velden - was castigate his clients for using so much of his copy. He - and everyone in the wire business -should be so lucky (the newspaper editors can be forgiven for thinking that if they pay good money for the service, they will do what they see fit with it).

A news agency is not a tip-off service or a checklist for one's own news diary; it's raison d'etre is to be first and to be accurate. And if it can't deliver that, there's no point to it at all.

Van der Velden told The Daily Maverick: "The media should take it [SAPA copy] as the beginning point for their own more detailed, more qualified, more in-depth reporting." Absolutely, if the SAPA report emanates from one's own newsgathering area but, if it's from another city or if it's about national politics or a sport one doesn't have a specialist writer covering, you expect the copy to be accurate.

I totally agree with Van der Velden's assertion that the newspapers should have phoned Malema's spokesman to check the facts but then so should have SAPA. Politicians often speak in code and suggest rather than state facts. Part of reporting on politics is to go to the politicians afterwards and say: "By saying blah, blah, blah, do you I understand correctly that you are saying: yada yada yada?"

Excellent point

However, Van der Velden makes an excellent point in that the newspapers love to malign SAPA for being bland, forgetting of course that they rely on the feed to fill up their pages.

The conundrum is that SAPA needs to innovate and change in order to continue to make itself valuable to the newspapers it serves - but it can only make those changes with the approval and direction of its owners and these are... you guessed it... the newspapers it serves.

Van der Velden told Bizcommunity.com that he thinks SAPA needs to get into multimedia, citing the extremely successful South Korean news agency, Yonhap, as a model for leaping into the new media world.

"For a news agency's survival, you should be changing," says Van der Velden, "but does a newspaper which owns a news agency have that much interest in the purpose of the news agency changing? That's an inherent conflict and what news agencies around the world are wrestling with."

If the sun does eventually set on SAPA, it will be because the newspapers were too slack to demand change and oversee its reinvention.

For more:

• Reuters Editors Blog: Changing journalism; changing Reuters
  
• Poynter.org: AP planning mobile apps that offer "new experiences" for consumers

Last updated at 5.05pm on 19 October 2010.