Cape Times editor Moegsien Williams tells Rehana Rossouw of his plans to redirect the paper at an increasingly upmarket audience
When Independent Newspapers announced in August this year that Moegsien Williams had been appointed editor of The Cape Times, speculation was rife in the Cape Town media industry that he would replace all white male staff with black females and rejig the paper to serve the needs of Khayelitsha rather than Camps Bay.
Last month, when he announced that
Sunday Times assistant editor Ryland Fisher had been appointed deputy editor of the paper, the affirmative action bogeymen again leapt into action, claiming they had evidence of Williams’ hidden agenda.
But, now that he’s settled into his leather chair on the sixth floor of Newspaper House in Cape Town, Williams is preparing to do exactly the opposite — attract more white readers and work with the staff he’s inherited.
”In the next few months I am hoping to enter into serious discussions with my colleagues – — who happen to be largely white, Ryland is the eighth person on the editorial staff who is not black — about transforming this paper,” says Williams.
”The staff will be given an opportunity to discuss their future careers. We will address the fears many people have about affirmative action, which many people translate into threatening white jobs.”
For Williams, transformation begins with changing the editorial content first and the staff much later. Like many editors, he is concerned about the growing threat of the electronic media on print, and the decline in youth and female readership.
The Cape Times has a circulation of 93 000, with 45 percent coloured readers, 38 percent white and 17 percent African. Williams intends growing the paper to
300 000 with 60 percent white readers, 35 percent coloured and five percent African.
”The trick is getting the content mix right in pursuit of those readers. I don’t have all the answers, these will only be revealed once I get to grips with the market, but I realise readers are angry with us because we are no longer relevant in their lives,” he says.
”We will need innovation and will practically have to reinvent newspapers to win back the readers we lost. Our Irish owners own both The Argus and The Cape Times and don’t want them competing for diminishing readers in the same market. So The Cape Times will go upmarket and the Argus will straddle the broader
Williams believes his stint as editor of South — one of the stable of ”alternative newspapers” in the 1980s — has taught him useful skills he can implement at a commercial
”I find myself often in executive meetings saying ‘at South we did things this way’. I have to continually stop myself. People from the alternative press have a lot to bring to commercial newspapers. The greatest gift from the democratic movement is the ability to be consultative, to seek consensus and to appreciate human values in the work
Perhaps because he is now employed by an Irish conglomerate, he uses a quote from Irish poet Seamus Heaney to illustrate his mission. Heaney wrote about the need to ”provide space to allow hope to grow” which Williams amended to ”allow space for creativity to grow”.
”My staff is the key. I have young, enthusiastic people in my newsroom who are able to see things with fresh eyes. I have pledged 80 percent of my time for their needs and instructed my secretary that if Nelson Mandela calls and I am in a meeting with a staffer, she has to tell him I’m not available.” Fortunately, Mandela has not yet called and his pledge has not yet been tested.
Williams intends a mini-relaunch of The Cape Times next year where some of his new ideas will be revealed. He has already made some changes to the paper, lengthening stories to tailor them for a more educated market, allowing space for more in-depth news pieces and anchoring each page with a real lead rather than the sound-bites The Cape Times had begun publishing.
”I would be the first to admit I would be far more comfortable if my staff were more representative of the readership we are targeting, but they don’t have to live among the community to reflect them in the paper.”