Avusa set to join newspapers houses' centralising drive

Bizcommunity.com has seen internal correspondence showing that sports staff were resisting the move. Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley did not respond to requests for comment before deadline but did acknowledge in an email that the issues with the staff have been resolved and the plan was going ahead.

Widget on the factory line

One can really sympathise with the sports staff. No one is comfortable with big changes in the work place. One day you're working for one newspaper, expected to serve and promote the brand with diligence and enthusiasm - the next you're told you'll be working for a bunch of titles, some of which you might seldom read as they are published in different towns to your own. It makes one feel just that little bit more like a widget on the factory line, doesn't it?

But, sadly, this is indeed the direction in which the media world is moving and, in fact, if Avusa's sports hub is a precursor to it creating more of these company-wide shared services, it is one of the last of the big SA newspaper houses to do so.

Making money in newspapers is tough these days and, in order to survive, media bosses are looking for efficiencies. "The glory days are over," Tim du Plessis, Media24's head of Afrikaans newspapers, told me when I asked him about what has worked - and what hasn't -three years after the company embarked on a shared-services drive.

Shared services at Media24

Shared services were introduced, says Du Plessis, after "one of our managers made a count a few years ago of all the Media24 journalists who were at a Springbok match in Durban. There were something like 13 Media24 journalists covering it for four newspapers - and three of them dailies with exactly the same deadlines."

Du Plessis says: "[Shared services] was [done] on a 'non-ideological' basis, if I can use that word. There was no decision that everything should become shared services. We went on a case-by-case basis."

This is an important point as Media24 is the kind of company that rearranges and restructures boldly and then comes back a while later to see what is working and what isn't. Then it changes and tweaks the original plan, even rearranging it all again if needs be.

Lessons learnt

So what has the company learned from the main shared-services hubs that were created? According to Du Plessis:

1. The combining of the staff of Sake (Media24's equivalent of Independent Newspapers' Business Report) with those of Finweek was unravelled last year as it was found that serving newspapers and a magazine was just too different.

2. The centralised sports hub under a national sports editors has worked fairly well, says Du Plessis, for the important reason that Media24 has many talented rugby writers who have then become available for all the papers. It is important to note the regional newspapers - Beeld in Gauteng, Die Burger in Cape Town and Volksblad in Bloemfontein - and the national Rapport have retained content editors to make sure regional sports and sporting issues are covered prominently in their papers.

   "Some of the papers are not all that happy about how the sports team functions," says Du Plessis, "but we are working at that and I think we'll be able to fix that... And we've achieved a huge cost saving there."

3. The centralised photographic team has worked very well and achieved a good cost-saving.

4. Day sub-editing (for early pages of the daily newspapers, supplements and for weekly Rapport) was centralised in Johannesburg but a core team of senior night-production people were retained at the three daily newspapers.

   "We discovered in this whole process that the regional identities of Beeld, Die Burger and Volksblad are actually very important and you need a [regional] production team to work on the main body [the front news section] of each of the titles," Du Plessis says, "I will fight very hard for the retention of that... They play a crucial role in maintaining the regional identity of each newspaper."

Controversy

In a review of Media24's shared services a year ago, changes included decentralising the outdoors supplement, Buite, and the arts pages, while the various titles' books pages were centralised. The latter caused controversy among the newspapers and readers. It took a full six months to implement this books-page decision, says Du Plessis, because of the opposition to it.

"Some of the editors say: 'I want control of the copy and supplements that go into my newspaper', says Du Plessis, himself a veteran journalist and former Beeld editor. "I think that is a position reached 20 or 30 years ago but we live in a different world now."

In the drive to do more with less, highly skilled people are key, says Du Plessis, adding, "If you go through something like this you must just explain to the journalists that there are usually very good reason for doing it... You must be open about things."

Centralised subbing at IOL

Over at Independent Newspapers, a centralised political team has been going for many years while, by March 2009, the company had centralised its subbing into one unit - about 100 people - spread throughout the company's offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. It falls under the Cape Town-based Dave Chambers.

Centralising subbing operations is a controversial move for many journalists - especially for subs - because it is believed that quality with fall as local knowledge is required to edit copy accurately and with a feel for local nuance, for example, in the writing of headlines.

But Chambers says he hasn't found this to be a concern because Independent Newspapers has so many titles with deadlines so close together and the sub-editors naturally gravitate towards the copy of their own former titles (the dailies include The Star, Pretoria News, Cape Times, Cape Argus, The Mercury and the Daily News).

"You'll find that subs in Pretoria won't naturally look for the most urgent story [to be subbed], they'll look for the Pretoria News story," says Chambers. And because the Pretoria News has very similar deadlines to all the other morning papers, it all works out.

Bonuses

The bonuses, according to Chambers, include:

1. Cost-saving: about R18 million in 2011, says Chambers, and "we're finding we're able to increase those efficiencies as the years go by, just because we're getting better at it and finding new ways at doing things efficiently."

2. The imbalances of production work flow have been ironed out. (Subs at a weekly newspaper, for instance, start the week very quietly but get frantically busy towards the end of week.) Now most people are now working consistently for eight hours a day, Chambers says, as there is always copy to fill the various downtimes. "I think a lot of them are probably finding things a lot less stressful and certainly a lot less unpleasant than they thought it would be."

3. People are able to sub to their strengths so that those who prefer subbing features - or hard news - can now do more of that.
   

Standards haven't dropped

Though quality was a major worry before the production hub was started, Chambers believes that standards haven't dropped since centralisation. It is important to note that the pages are laid out in the relevant centres - particularly the front page - so that the editor can direct the process if he or she wishes.

Further, the subbing of Business Report is separate while the company is looking at whether it makes sense to continue having the production of the sports pages centralised.

"We've acquired a new rhythm," Chambers says, "and it's not a rhythm that says: 'I'm working on one paper and this is the copy that comes through at a certain time of the week or a certain time of the day'. It says: 'I'm working for 15 newspapers and this is what the subbing queue is going to look like on a Wednesday afternoon'. It's a new rhythm and people know what to expect on particular days and what needs to be prioritised."

Not as scary

So centralised services are not as scary as one thinks and it certainly makes publishing sense in a world where it gets ever harder for most to make money out of media.

From a journalism perspective, it is not ideal but unless your newspaper or magazine or website is a non-profit organisation, the reality is that you work for a commercial entity - and the whole point of a company is to serve its shareholders first.

Internationally, there is a movement to start or to convert existing media entities into non-profit organisations but that's a story for another day - and maybe another era.

For more:

• Editors' Weblog: Non-profit journalism site launches in Australia: The Global Mail, February 2012
  
• Bizcommunity: Batten down the hatches: SA media heads for cost-cutting, November 2011
  
• Politicsweb: How SA's newspaper can save themselves, October 2011