The Harbinger


Farewell, Mr Kirsh

August 25th, 2009

William Kirsh’s departure as CEO of Primedia has been on the cards for some time, and is unlikely to rock the boat much.

Kirsh, who took over his father’s small radio company and turned it into a media giant though aggressive acquisitions in the 1990s, will remain as deputy chair and a significant shareholder. Kuben Pillay takes over, representing a shift in power from the Kirsh family to the Mineworkers Investment Company, the shareholders who brought Pillay in a few years ago.

Insiders have been saying for some months that Kirsh had been disengaging from the company and Pillay was effectively running it. Kirsch became very religious a few years ago and this has taken more and more of his time and focus. Also, with Primedia having become a private equity company a few years ago, Kirsh’s aggressive and shrewd deal-making skills were no longer in much demand.

Kirsch was a merchant banker and dealmaker who took charge of his father’s spunky little radio station company in the late 1980s and took it public. He used his brash deal-making style to build it into a powerhouse, stepping on more than a few toes on the way. The value of the company rocketed as the market backed his style of borrowing to pay high prices for a range of media interests. But when some of these investments - particularly the international ones - turned sour, and it became clear he had paid too much for some of them, the stock plummeted and he was forced to eat humble pie.

To his credit, he cleaned up the company, selling and closing assets to bring the focus back onto the major performers, such as radio. He also turned to his Orthodox Jewish roots.

Kirsch himself led the move to take the company private a few years ago, sharing control with the Mineworkers. But this meant they had to borrow large amounts and focus on paying back the debt. When the climate turned tough in the last couple of years, there was not much deal-making to be done and Kirsch gradually became less and less engaged - to the point where there was a restlessness among his senior management.

It is to his credit that he recognised that he was no longer playing to his strengths and it was time to move over. The switch to Pillay’s leadership is expected to be seemless, as he has effectively been running the operations for some time and enjoys the respect of his management team.

Nevertheless, it is the end of a long era in which the Kirsch’s were leading media personalities in the country. They started the company by exploiting a loophole in bantustan policy - getting permission to broadcast medium wave from the nominally independent Bophuthatswana. Criticism of their cosiness with the discredited homeland was offset by the spunkiness and independence of Radio 702. Now the empire that grew around that base is in the hands of a trade union investment fund.

The circle has turned.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Radio

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Anton Harber: Media

Anton Harber

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Department of Useless Information

Among the main results from the World Association of Newspaper’s Newsroom Barometer (a survey of 700 editors and senior news execs in 120 countries) for this year:
- 86% believe integrated print and online newsrooms will become the norm, and 83% believe journalists will be expected to be able to produce content for all media within five years.
- Two-thirds believe some editorial functions will be outsourced, despite frequent newsroom opposition to the practice.
- A plurality - 44% - believe on-line will be the most common platform for reading news in the future, compared with 41% last year. Thirty-one cited print (down from 35% last year), 12% mobile and 7% e-paper. The rest were unsure.
- A majority of editors - 56%- believe news in the future will be free, up from 48% from last year’s survey. Only one-third believe the news will remain paid for, while 11% were unsure. - From Editors’ Weblog

Worth Reading

There is a crisis in trust and communication between the British public and the mainstream media, a new report has concluded. The gulf between public expectations of news provision and the actual nature of articles, which oscillate between esoteric or irresponsible, leaves readers feeling confused and excluded.
The report, entitled ‘Public Trust In The News’ was conducted by researchers from Manchester and Leeds Universities and was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. - From Editors Weblog

Other writings

Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy - Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004).

Journalism in the Age of the Market
- Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, Centre for Civil Society, University of KZN, Aug 2002

The Untimely Death of SA’s Finest Daily - Sunday Times, May 2005

“Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence” from Go Home or Die Here, edited by Shireen Hassim Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby (WUP, 2008)

Remarks at Goedgedacht Forum, October 2008

The rise of social network journalism - From The 2009 Flux Trend Review (Macmillan, 2008)

A recent piece by me on the Zapiro cartoon row which appeared in Comment is Free, a Guardian blog.

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