Newpapers wake up to the importance of content

Latest adspend figures showing a leap from R9 billion a few years ago to R17 billion today are a bit misleading because of that total about R4 billion has to be attributed to media promoting themselves. Which is not actually adspend but rather utilisation of unsold inventory.

But, whether the increase is a massive 100% or only half that, there is no question that it has rescued many and ailing mass medium.

Encouraging Signs

And there are encouraging signs that the tendency by newspapers to cut back drastically on costs by brutally eliminating overheads and shedding journalists faster than Eskom has been load-shedding power in the Western Cape, might be a thing of the past.

Independent Newspapers was particularly cold blooded about cost cutting in the mid-1990's and seemed to have adopted a somewhat suicidal policy of simply filling the spaces between ads with editorial either lifted from overseas sources or produced locally at the lowest possible cost.

Exacerbating the problem caused by stripping newsrooms of quality journalists was Independent's overly hasty attempts in the early 1990's to place black editors at the helms of all their major newspaper titles.

Unfair to Blacks

Which was extremely cruel and unfair to many of the black journalists who were hopelessly ill-prepared for editing newspapers and who spent years stumbling about in the dark.

And the ruse of making sure that every black editor had a reasonably experienced white editor as his deputy only made the problem and the tokenism of it all a lot worse. Because the white underlings mostly resented having to play second fiddle and were often more of a hindrance than a help to the editors.

Now of course, the more paranoid of people in the media industry, of which there are many, with paranoia and pettiness apparently being pre-requisites to newspaper management these days, will start accusing me of racism for suggesting that black editors have stuffed up many of our newspapers.

Whites are Guilty

What I am saying is that it is not black editors but white management that has actually come close to stuffing up our newspapers by taking ill-prepared black people and making them editors overnight. It has nothing to do with racism but everything to do with overexuberant, ill-considered stupidity on the part of white newspaper owners falling over themselves trying to impress government and the majority of their target markets.

It has been Independent Newspapers that has now seemed to have adopted the stance of putting the best editorial teams in to run their newspapers and dump tokenism altogether.

Good Editor

Take the Cape Times for example. Unquestionably the best daily newspaper in the country right now. Why? Because it is edited by a fellow called Chris Whitfield who is a good editor not because he is white but because he has had the privilege of years and years of experience editing newspapers. And before that he had years and years of working under great editors who took great pains to teach him and many of his colleagues how to edit newspapers. Precious few of these privileged people were black.

Then suddenly many blacks were hauled straight out of often the lower ranks of the newsroom into editors' chairs, bypassing anything between 10 and 20 years of traditional and essential apprenticeship.

So, it's fascinating and refreshing to see an organisation such as Independent Newspapers apparently dumping its die-hard policy of appointing only black editors in exchange for appointing experience and the best person for the job be he black, white, yellow, green or female.

Dowdy and Downmarket

Now, Chris Whitfield has been appointed editor of the Argus and it is going to be interesting to see what effect his vast experience has on this paper that with the best will in the world has been looking decidedly dowdy, downmarket and desperate for a long time.

Newspapers in South Africa have essentially done a very good job in bringing as many blacks into their editorial ranks as possible.

They have unfortunately done a shocking job on training and preparing them for editorship. And those who are excellent editors today have probably achieved this by their own dogged determination.