» Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times

July 15th, 2007

I have been silent on the Times, the daily paper for Sunday Times subscribers, because it is always too easy to criticise a new paper before it has time to find its feet. But I am ready to make some tentative observations.

The paper offers news lite, in the style of the London subway newspapers being handed out for free, and that is not to my personal taste. But if one accepts that this is what it is, and there is probably demand for such a product, it is quite well put together. There are some fresh ideas in it and it is effectively designed and laid out, I think. The use of photographs has been good. They have missed a story or two, but their treatment of others - like the Robert MacBride case this last Thursday - has been bold and effective.

The biggest dissappointment, however, has been the website. They have over-promised on this aspect, and under-delivered. If you are promising to lead the way in interactive news with multimedia content, then you can’t offer up badly made videos, sometimes repeating the interview one has already seen in print and at other times just amateurish and sophomoric.

The editors have made a song and dance about how this represents the grand move to multimedia. But a bad video of a print interview does not a multimedia package make.

I suspect the strategy they have adopted is overambitious. They have created four-person teams of reporters/editors who work at producing multimedia on their stories. They would do better to choose one big story a day and ensure that one was drawn to the website by the knowledge that there would be substantially more and better stuff on the web. One story done effectively in multimedia would be worth a lot more than a hodge-podge of variable quality.

All in all, however, their rivals must be nervous of the potential impact of the paper. At the same time, their own accountants must be jumping at the numbers flowing past them. This is an expensive venture which is totally reliant on advertising revenue and the ads have been few and far between. It will take some months to make mark on the advertising industry, and in that time the costs are going to rocket.

Let’s hope they stay the course.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Online, Print

1 Comment Add your own

1. Average reader | July 16th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

Bravo Anton. I think you speak for so many who are too nervous to stand alone in their (what I agree is fair) criticism of The Times.

The bigger you are, the harder you fall. And these guys sold the idea of The Times as a revolutionary new take on everything South African media had seen before. Unfortunately, it’s not.

I think though that time will help. But broken promises are not easily forgiven. Does this make me visit The Times more than IOL on a daily basis? No. Does it make the average Sunday Times subscriber visit their website more? I’m sure the answer is also no, at least for 70% of them anyway.

Anyhow, good luck to them. They’re trying.

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
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Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

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“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)