An editor without a newspaper

April 27th, 2010

Watch out when a publisher uses words like “excellence” and “holistic strategy”. Look carefully when they say they are promoting an editor because of increased readership.

That’s what happened to Mondli Makhanya of the Sunday Times last week, when he was booted upstairs to the position of editor-in-chief of Avusa newspapers.

Never mind that the Sowetan already has an editor-in-chief. And the Sunday Times now has an editor-in-chief and an editor, and a deputy editor, and an editor for the Times, and a Business Times editor, and a Lifestyle editor, and a managing editor, and a bunch of other deputies, and so on … If only they had as many reporters as editors, they would be flush with great stories.

Avusa CEO Prakash Desai said Makhanya “would be charged with setting up and running centres of excellence that will produce unique, original and compelling content for all the group’s newspapers and websites” as part of a “holistic strategic review”. If you understand this gobbledygook, kindly explain it to me. It is the kind of nonsense that Sunday Times reporters would never accept without challenge when it comes from the spokespersons of other companies.

I think it means they are going to follow the pattern of centralising some editorial functions for their different papers, as is being done at rival publishers like Media24 and Independent newspapers. But it is one thing to run joint newsrooms for a band of similar papers; it is another when you have a disparate bunch like the Sunday Times, Sowetan and Daily Dispatch.

The bald fact is that Makhanya is now an editor without a newspaper.

Desai credited Makhanya with taking Sunday Times readership from 3,2-m to nearly 4-m. A more precise figure, and therefore more relevant, might be that Sunday Times street sales and subscriptions had fallen below 400 000 and its total (including bulk sales and educational give-aways) down to 464 000, which is about 50 000 less than the previous year.

This is way below the circulation dip that led to the dismissal of Makhanya’s predecessor, Mathatha Tsedu. It also comes after the recessional dip in advertising, which hit Sunday Times job adverts heavily, and the push by City Press to grab more market share. Rapport and Sunday Independent also recently appointed new editors. Sunday Times is no doubt shaping up for this fight for Sunday readers.

A better tribute to Makhanya’s tenure at the Sunday Times would be to say that he bravely carved out valuable political space for his editorial team and protected it with unwavering fortitude.

Under Makhanya, the Sunday Times bravely took on the more eccentric elements of the Mbeki government, particularly Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Mbeki’s hit-man, Essop Pahad (now himself a would-be editor), pulled government advertising from the Sunday Times, but Makhanya stood firm and the paper stood proud. When he faced corporate and political pressure to reign in Zapiro, the paper’s powerful cartoonist, he did not flinch. He was the first to take on Jacob Zuma’s rape charges, and unremitting in pursuing the arms deal corruption charges. In his editorial page column, Makhanya’s has tackled the toughest issues, and this has made it compulsive reading for some years.

But his reputation took a knock with a series of weak stories in 2007 which damaged the paper’s credibility, and his editorship never quite recovered.

There is no doubting the merits of his successor, Ray Hartley, who moves up from the daily Times to the big Sunday mother paper. Hartley is a popular and respected editor who has given the Times punch and character and carved out a place for it in the daily market.

His position as head of the daily will be taken by the spunky Phylicia Oppelt, who made her mark at the Daily Dispatch for strong stories of national significance like the Frere Hospital exposé of 2007. She went from there to rehabilitate the Business Times section of the Sunday Times quite successfully, and is now positioned as a likely future editor of the mother ship.

All of them will, however, face the same issue that led to the demise of Makhanya and Tsedu before him: the imposing figure of Avusa Media MD Mike Robertson looking over their shoulders. Relations between editors and publishers are always difficult, the more so when they are themselves successful former editors who were kicked upstairs.

* This column first appeared in Business Day, March 31, 2010

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print