» Independence at last?

Independence at last?

February 23rd, 2010

Friday is the deadline for a deal for Tony O’Reilly to sell the Independent in London to Russian mogul Alexander Lebedev. Let’s hold thumbs.

I don’t wish any evil on the Independent in London, although it is a shadow of the wonderful newspaper it was in its early days. But getting rid of this massive loss-maker, may enable O’Reilly to stop bleeding his South African newspapers and start investing in some long-term growth and some resources for his squeezed editorial teams in this country.

The Independent papers here have been in the ridiculous position of making a fantastic profit, but having to send most of it to London to cover the losses there, and cutting costs relentlessly back at home.

Lebedev went to Downing Street yesterday to meet Prime Minister George Brown, seen as a courtesy visit as the deal is being finalised. Staff have accepted reduced redundancy entitlements to facilitate the deal. O’Reilly desperately needs to get rid of the paper (or close it) to satisfy shareholders who have been baying for his blood over his running of a public company rather like a family business and his tolerance for the long-term losses of the Independent.

Lebedev already owns the Evening Standard and has created a free edition of this traditional London newspaper in a bid to bolster its decline and take on the London free-sheets which have hurt its circulation. He is becoming a master of picking up London papers in trouble. He got the Standard for “a nominal amount” and it looks like O’Reilly will have to pay up to £20-m (paying to get out of print contracts, writing off losses, etc) to get rid of the Indie. Since the price of closure has been given as £35-m, he is getting off lightly and you can be sure the delay in the sale is because Lebedev is pushing a hard bargain to get it for next to nothing - knowing O’Reilly has his back to the wall.

it is probably naive to think the London sale is going to mean a change of ethos back here. But the South Africa group has slid from being the biggest English newspaper group in the country to second to Media 24 (measured in terms of number of papers sold daily), and its dependence on classified advertising makes it extremely vulnerable to the rise of the Internet. It could well do with some investment, some vision and some TLC.

It contributed a massive Euro26-m to international profits in the last available figures (at a fantastic margin of 31%), so a few million moved to editorial will hardly touch sides.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print

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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)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“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)