» Now the Indie Group enters the fray with more newspapers planned

Now the Indie Group enters the fray with more newspapers planned

July 31st, 2007

The Independent Group is planning a new Sunday newspaper to take on the Sunday Times and City Press. And the first casualty could be their own Sunday Independent.

Sunday Times recently launched a challenge to the Independent’s flagship, The Star, in the form of their free-to-subscribers daily, the Times. With a focus on careers, the new paper is a direct attack on the Star’s hold on the daily jobs market. It presents a much livelier and lighter read than the Star.

Now the Star is responding with plans to bring out the Sunday Star. It will be a tabloid and the project is being led by veteran newsman Ray Joseph.

It would in fact be a relaunch, as the Sunday Star was a venture that failed some years back.

To take on the Sunday Times is to challenge the country’s most formidable, well-established and lucrative publishing machine. City Press is also in a strong position, having had a recent rise of circulation under editor Mathatha Tsedu and with the powerful Media 24 group behind it. Also on a Sunday, there is Rapport, the large Afrikaans paper, Sondag, the new Afrikaans tabloid, Sunday Sun and Sunday Sowetan. That does not leave much room for new products.

But in an active market in which other publishers have been aggressively launching new products, this is the first significant move by the Independent Group for some time. The Group has been cost and staff-cutting for some years, producing colossal profits for their Irish owners but re-investing little of it back here. They famously passed on the Daily Sun, allowing their competitors at Media 24 to sew up the fastest-growing market segment.

Independent executives I spoke to today were keen to say that the new product was only one of a number of projects in the planning stages. It did not have approval or even a proper budget yet, said Mike Tissong.

Joseph confirmed this, saying only that various options were being considered and no decisions had been made.

But Sunday Independent staff were recently told that they had to do something about their steady 40 000 circulation. The group was planning to launch (or relaunch) the Sunday Star, they were told, and the managers indicated the Independent would be under pressure to increase its sales.

The Sunday Independent has long been starved of resources. It has no full-time editor (Jovial Rantao spends all his time as Star deputy-editor and leaves the running of the Sunday paper to others), only two reporters and no marketing budget. It’s chances of increasing circulation without some resources to back this up are, to put it plainly, nil.

However, the Sunday Independent was the pet project of the group’s owner, Tony O’Reilly, who touted it in the early days of his investment as his contribution to quality, serious journalism. It is thought that he has too much invested politically and personally to close the Sunday Indie down in a hurry.

Nevertheless, another new newspaper would stir up an already boiling newspaper cauldron. And it would shake the Indie Group out of its complacency.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print

6 Comments Add your own

1. Karl | July 31st, 2007 at 8:07 pm

Anton,

There are markets outside of Gauteng in case you’ve forgotten.

The Independent Group in South Africa has launched both the Daily Voice and Isolezwe in recent years.

Both products are flying.
2. Show me the money | August 1st, 2007 at 12:22 am

Silent complacency and, don’t forget, absolutely flatline circulations. But a Sunday Sun? Goodness. Who would have thought they would be (a) going down that road again; and (b) prepared to invest in anything. As fond as I am of the Sunday Indy (and the handful of people who give their all to that paper week after week), I don’t believe that O’Reilly has anything invested in “quality, serious journalism” for years and there’s nothing stopping him from closing it down. That paper, which was launched in 1994, is the abandoned child of Shaun Johnson and Ivan Fallon, whose attentions are now directed elsewhere. And it takes much, much more than a part-time editor to grow circulation…
3. Anton | August 1st, 2007 at 3:23 am

Good point, Karl. The Voice was a late counter to the growth of tabloids. Isolezwe has been a major contributor to our media landscape. Credit where credit is due! - Anton
4. Rob | August 1st, 2007 at 8:45 am

Typical of Independent: after everyone else has done something and it works, they decide it is a good idea and follow. But by then it is too late. And I think expecting new investment here is a bit optimistic. I bet they’ll use existing resources - ie the Star and Sat Star reporters and subs - to produce the Sunday Star.Or better - they’ll close the Indy and and use those resources - computers, staff etc - to produce the Sunday Star.
5. Karl | August 1st, 2007 at 12:55 pm

The Voice (obvious direct personal interest declared here) would only have been a ‘late’ counter if it actually traded in the same market as the Daily Sun. It doesn’t.

The Voice was the first daily tabloid in the Western Cape. Die Son launched two weeks later.

In any case, being first to market is no real advantage in newspapers. The Daily Mirror in the UK peaked at more than 5.5 million sales a day under Hugh Cudlipp. The Daily Express was selling 3.8 million copies a day around about the same time. Then Rupert Murdoch launched The Sun in the 1970s. It took only a matter of years for the ‘Soaraway Sun’ to become the biggest selling daily in the country. The Mirror has been in constant decline since and now sells in the region of 1.5 million a day while the Express is a joke of a paper that barely manages 750,000.

The Sun has slipped somewhat from its peaks of in excess of 4 million but still sells more than 3 million copies.

The newspapers that professors and media commentators love to love like the Guardian and the Times both lose huge amounts of money. As Paul Dacre recently pointed out, the Times is subsidised by The Sun and the News of the World while the Guardian is subsidised by Auto Trader magazine (a fact that the Guardian’s anti-captialist lefties like to forget).

The point of this is that newspapers cannot be editorially independent unless they are financially independent.

People seem to get excited about crazy schemes like ThisDay and Nova as well as charity newspapers like The Times in South Africa when they launch and then bemoan the stupidity of the market for not wanting them when they, inevitably, close shorlty afterwards in mass teeth gnashing and reciminations. It’s akin to sailors complaining about the sea or, even worse, politicians blaming the electorate for their poor performances.
6. Bernard | August 16th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

Who knows, maybe they are planning to kill the Sunday Independent completely. They own Sunday Independent since its inception it is still struggling to make an impact in the Sunday market. I mean its steady 40 000 circulation, TELLS IT LIKE IT IS!

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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.
Full bio

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)