I've gone out of my way to hire grey beards - New Age's Fisher

Ryland Fisher

"We hope we have shown, through the newspapers we produce Mondays to Fridays, that we have no hidden agendas. The only thing we are trying to do is to produce excellent newspapers on a daily basis."

Bizcommunity.com talks to Fisher about how The New Age is turning into a thoroughly decent newspaper, the mystery of its sales figures and its expansion plans in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

Bizcommunity: I see you sign your column as editor of The New Age so are you officially editor rather than acting when you took over from Henry Jeffreys [in June this year]?
Ryland Fisher: Well, no editor can say he's there to stay at any paper, you know, but from my side I've signed a contract and I'm taking the opportunity to develop the paper.

Biz: What interests me is your mandate to be optimistic and pro-South African. Nobody sets out to be negative - it's just that papers get besieged by crime stories and terrible things going on. Are you guys finding it hard to find a balance?
Fisher: I think where we are different is that we don't focus on crime. We don't ignore it but we don't go looking for stories of hijacking, etc, that we can put on the front page. We believe there're a lot of positive things happening in the country and we do go out of our way to look for them.

If you look at our recent papers, we had some pretty amazing stories that were positive stories - not about government - but about the people in this country. We had a story of a woman from Gauteng who took R60 from her socal grant - she lived in a RDP house - and she started a little food garden and now she's feeding 700 people in her community. We also had a story about a guy who built a bridge in Langa [in Cape Town].

The New Age, 22 September 2011

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Biz: Yes, I saw that. It was a lekker story.
Fisher: He was charging people 50c to cross the bridge but he had identified there was a need for this thing - that's the kind of stuff we are trying to do differently. Like I said, we can't ignore crime because it's a reality in our country so from time to time we do play a crime story big but we don't go out of way to lead the paper with it.

Biz: When a big crime story comes along, is there quite a bit of debate at conference on how you're going to play it?
Fisher: I think people [at the paper] are mindful of what we're trying to do here. But also we've got a lot of experience in this newsroom and so people know when it's big enough for us to break our own rules.

Biz: Speaking of which, you've got a very experienced newsdesk in Raymond Joseph (@rayjoe) [a veteran freelancer and who was a highly regarded Sunday Times news editor] and Moses Mudzwiti, whom I don't know but I believe he comes from The Times.
Fisher: In fact, I worked with Moses at the Cape Times [when Fisher was editor], where Moses was deputy news editor to Colin Howell. He's very experienced.

Biz: OK, but obviously someone like Ray doesn't stay forever as he's a freelancer and a consultant so what happens when he heads back to Cape Town?
Fisher: We've made offers to two very, very senior people and, in fact, the one guy started today and the other one will hopefully start quite soon.

Biz: Can you tell me who they are?
Fisher: Well, the one who started today is Kenosi Modisane, who has worked for the Daily Sun and City Press and The Star. He's also worked for SABC Radio and Television and the BBC. He's been in journalism for 25 years and mainly running newsdesk[s].

The other one is also a very senior person. I've gone out of my way to consciously look for grey beards because they can provide the stability that we need at this paper. But we also go for the young people to come up and provide us with innovation - the challenge is to balance the stability and innovation.

The New Age, Western Cape edition

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Biz: You launched your Western Cape edition recently. Have you beefed up your bureau in Cape Town with new staff?
Fisher: We have. We've appointed someone to put this project in place in the Western Cape. And we also have an arrangement with West Cape News [agency] for them to supply us with copy on a daily basis. They've got quite a few people and we've employed a photographer.

Biz: The paper's only nine months old so I'm guessing you're all putting in quite long hours as you find your feet.
Fisher: I'm in here before 8 o'clock in the morning and we have quite a few 12-hours days. The paper is still very new and it needs TLC.

I take responsibility to oversee Page 1. It's very hands-on editing but I took that decision - that I needed to be hands on... At the Cape Times I was a very different kind of editor because, I think, the paper was a lot more established and everybody knew their roles.

Biz: I see you've got [President Jacob] Zuma doing a breakfast with readers soon. That's quite a coup, isn't it?
Fisher: Not really. We've had the minister of mining and the minister of communications [doing similar things]. Now we've got the president coming up in October and in November we've got [Western Cape Premier] Helen Zille. The idea is to have a different political figure every month.

Biz: And is it a brand extension? What are you hoping to achieve from these events?
Fisher: Well, we get a lot of play in other media from having these breakfasts so it's really just part of developing our brand.

Biz: Can I ask you about your provincial [news] pages. To me, they don't really sit well with the paper because the news is quite parochial. I wonder -don't they take up too much space?
Fisher: From our side, the provincial pages are one of our USPs - they are really one of our strong selling points... Just about everybody I speak with likes the fact that we focus on the smaller provinces and give a voice to the provinces that don't normally feature on the national agenda.

We're quite determined to develop them even more. And [just like with the Western Cape edition] our intention is to go other provinces in a big way... The next one is KwaZulu-Natal and after KZN, there are two or three provinces we've got our eyes on.

Biz: You guys are not being audited by ABC yet so what are you selling? Can you give me any indication of the numbers and which are your strong areas?
Fisher: At the moment the strong areas are Gauteng, Western Cape and KZN... but we are in all nine provinces... I can't tell you at the moment what we're selling but we will be telling the market quite soon. Before the end of the year, it's our intention to come out with an audited certificate.

Biz: Through ABC?
Fisher: That I can't tell you at the moment but I can tell you that we will have an audited certificate whether it's done through the ABC or not.

Biz: When the paper launched, it was targeting LSM 5-7 but have you guys done more reader research since then? Can you tell me anything about what you're learning about your readers.
Fisher: We haven't actually done more reader research since then. Newspaper editing is quite often a gut thing. You have to use your gut in knowing what the readers wants.

I think the good editors are right 60%-70% of the time but the key is obviously to learn from the wrong decisions and not to make the same mistakes twice. We have our reader in our heads whenever we write and put our paper together.

You know, quite often we miss what the reader wants but I think that applies to just about everyone [in newspapers].

Biz: Do you think you're finding a new market or which papers do you think you are competing against?
Fisher: I would like to think that we are helping to develop a new market. And also that maybe we are get people who are fed up with the negativity and pessimism of other media - that we're appealing to those people.

Biz: You've been consulting for a while. What's it like being back in the hot seat?
Fisher: It's exciting and interesting but it's also been challenging. I think the industry has moved on in the past 10 years [since I was editor of the Cape Times] so part of my challenge is to edit this newspaper in a way that takes into consideration the changes that have come about with technology.

What I've decided is rather than fight technology we must embrace it. So you'll see we're very interactive with our website, with Facebook, Twitter, etc...

Biz: And are you putting all your content online - or are you holding some of it back?
Fisher: We put our entire edition online. We were the first paper [in SA] to have an iPad edition - in fact, it came out before the print edition.

At the moment all of it is free. At some point we might decide to charge for it - when we see there's enough interest...

For more:

• Bizcommunity: 'Innovation key to new markets - New Age CEO Nazeem Howa', January 2011
  
• Bizcommunity: Interview with Gary Naidoo, managing editor of The New Age, November 2010
  
• Bizcommunity: Interview with Vuyo Mvoko, the first editor of The New Age, who left a few days before the aborted first launch of the paper, July 2010