Deon du Plessis: Hard to like, easy to admire

January 7th, 2012

No individual impacted more on South African newspapers in recent years than Deon du Plessis, the Daily Sun publisher, who died on the weekend.

Du Plessis conceived and executed the creation of the Daily Sun in 2002, which rocketed to sales of over 500 000 copies daily, more than three times its nearest rival among daily newspapers. When established newspapers were stagnating or shrinking, Deon created a new working class market.

In a world where media groups thought only about upper income readers, Deon showed that the most interesting and vibrant market was in the townships. And when you win over a few million more newspaper readers, it has a massive, but difficult-to-measure social impact.

Deon had a genius for populist journalism. In his newsroom, he placed a mannequin of a black worker in blue overalls and every time there was an editorial decision to be made, he would point at it and ask, “What would the man in blue overalls want to read?”

He had research guru Jos Kuper find him the answers, and they were not always as expected. The man in blue overalls did not want a Page 3 girl, the traditional tabloid fare. He did not want celebrities and movie stars. He did not want smart, witty headlines with word plays and puns. He did want self-improvement material. He did want short, punchy stories which spoke of his daily struggles. He did want the lurid, entertaining material about tokoloshes and two-headed goats.

Deon delivered it with ruthless determination. He had the tabloid master’s obsession with giving readers what they wanted, tasteful or not, and contempt for the tendency of journos to write for themselves and their friends, rather than for their audience. His second – and most passionate – dislike was for words of more than two syllables.

He snarled at those who complained that his paper did not meet their suburban standards. “Stop reading my paper,” he would tell his critics. “I insist, do not even look at it. It is not for you and you will never understand it. Please ignore it.” Except that he used more earthy language.

His paper had been sceptical of Jacob Zuma in the first stages of his presidential bid, until the research showed that his readers liked Zuma. From then on, so did he.

Time and again, I discovered that most of those who criticized his paper from lofty heights did not read it. The newspaper industry awards made fools of themselves by ignoring the biggest phenomenon in the local newspaper world, and then creating a token category for “popular journalism”. Deon didn’t bother to enter. He had what mattered to him: not the admiration of his peers, but the massive audience that his rivals could only dream about.

Other tabloids followed him, but none could match his raw instincts and they achieved much smaller circulation.

The Daily Sun was – and still is - the only South African medium in which you regularly see the faces, hear the voices and read of the daily struggles of ordinary people dealing with the toxic township mix of cowardly criminals, bossy bureaucrats, petty politicians and troublesome tokoloshes. And that is why it was bought and loved.

Deon first took the Daily Sun plan to the Independent, where he had worked most of his life. But it took vision and courage to do it, and the Independent never had it. When Media24 embraced his plan, it signaled a seismic shift in the balance of power in the newspaper industry.

In recent months, circulation dropped to 380 000, and Deon was obsessed with getting it back up – a task now made much more difficult by his absence.

Deon was a larger-than-life, ink-in-his-blood personality, a straight-talking, foul-mouthed, gruff-voiced journalist of the old school, always entertaining, often offensive, never delicate or tactful, maybe the last of the great character editors. You never had to ask what he thought about you or your work because he let you know – in colourful language of the sort that would get radio DJs fired.

He was hard to like, but easy to admire.

* This column first appeared in Business Day, 14 September 2011

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print