The Sunday Times’ policy of producing racially targeted ‘Extra’ editions has come under fire. Neil Bierbaum reports
IS the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Sunday Times, living in the past? Gauteng Premier Tokyo Sexwale took aim at the paper’s separate racially-targeted editions last week, criticising the paper for continuing to “produce ‘Extra’ covers around their white supremacist main publication”.
It seems that Sexwale has not bought the paper for the past four-and-a-half years; the Extra has been produced as a separate edition during that period, and not as a wraparound. Nevertheless, his point raises the question, and he’s not the only reader who has criticised the perceived need for a separate edition. Many staffers such as arts editor Charlotte Bauer, who says she finds the separate editions “ludicrous”, have raised the same point.
Bauer’s section is one of those most affected by the decision to print separate editions. The arts section in the Extra edition has a separate editor, Doc Bikitsha. The sports pages also differ significantly between the two, with the Extra edition emphasising boxing and soccer while the main edition emphasises rugby and cricket.
The front pages differ and different emphasis is given to a few stories inside the paper. The Inside magazine and the Business Times section are identical, while the Extra edition does not carry the Metro, which in Gauteng has a northern suburbs bias and in KwaZulu-Natal “reflects the population and reader profile of Durban”, according to chief assistant editor Mike Robertson. An Indian Extra is still distributed in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal country districts, “because the readers want it”, he adds. There is also a Cape Metro.
Advertisers ignore the splits and the same adverts appear in the main and Extra editions.
Separate editions for different race groups have a long history in South African newspapers. Until recently, The Star was putting out six editions a day, including an ‘Africa’ edition which “placed a greater emphasis on soccer and boxing”. The Sunday Times started out with regional wraparounds which eventually became the Metro sections, which were aimed at coloured, Indian or black readers.
Robertson says that the paper lost circulation when the wraparound was converted to the inserted Metro section. Today, the Cape and Gauteng Metro sections are more in line with the reader profile targeted by the main edition of the paper.
The Star Africa edition was dropped in June 1993. Since then, the circulation of The Star has declined, as has its black readership profile — from 53,8 percent of its total readership in 1993 to 41,4 percent in 1995, according to the All Media Product Survey.
General manager of The Star Graeme King points to aggressive price increases over that period as the reason for this decrease in black readership. He does not think that dropping the Africa edition played any part. “It was a political decision,” he says. “We thought it was wrong to have a separate edition. I don’t think any newspaper can afford to have editions based on race these days.” He does not think the Sunday Times would suffer by incorporating all the sports and arts coverage into one paper.
Robertson is not convinced. “Readers do have different interests whether we like it or not, and we straddle so many circulation markets. If the readers want it this way the editor must serve them and the board that appoints him. The editor may choose to do it but I doubt he would if it meant losing circulation.”
Amps figures reveal that the Sunday Times has steadily lost black readers over the past five years, with its profile going from being 41,5 percent black to 35,7 percent black. Ironically it has lost much of this to City Press, of which more than 90 percent of its readers are black.
Most of the circulation of the Extra edition goes to Soweto and the East Rand townships. One alternative which has been considered is a Sowetan Metro. The logistical problem, according to Robertson, is to find printing time. The ideological problem is clear: would soccer then be relegated to the Metro section?
Clearly, having two editions is seen as the correct way to keep the circulation up — or at least to slow the fall. If this paper were to make a choice, the outcome might tell us something about the state of our new rainbow nation.
The global trend is towards niched print products and the Sunday Times remains one of the highest circulating newspapers in the world, in a relatively small market. Perhaps it is trying to hold on to the past in more ways than one.