Deon du Plessis has a small plastic figurine of a bearded warrior on the edge of his desk. It stares down any staff member or guest that walks into his office. The thing is holding a battle-axe high in the air, like it’s about to chop a limb off. This vicious little toy is really the dwarf Gimli, from the film version of Lord of the Rings, but it reminds du Plessis of his favourite line from Conan the Barbarian. ”Find the enemy, crush him, and hear the lamentations of the women.”
That’s about as plain an on-the-record declaration of war as you’re ever likely to hear in South Africa’s media industry. In a lesser mouth such an avowal would sound hollow, disingenuous even; coming from the larger-than-life Daily Sun publisher it’s just bloody intimidating. Fact is, it’s taken the man less than three years to achieve success to match his giant stature, and the newspaper fraternity will not be shown mercy any time soon. According to du Plessis and Daily Sun co-founder and general manager Fergus Sampson, all that’s stopping the title from doubling its audited circulation of 364,356 (ABC July to December 2004) is printing capacity. ”There’s a new printer on the way,” says Sampson. ”It has capacity for 700,000 copies a day and we’ve already applied for 900,000. By the time that one arrives it will be too small again.”
To reiterate, there’s no false bravado here. Their own figures tell du Plessis and Sampson that the Daily Sun is currently hitting sales highs of over 500,000 a day. The Sunday Times, which averages around 505,000 audited weekly sales and for decades has been touted as South Africa’s ”publishing monster”, could well lose its right to that claim when the second lot of 2005 ABCs are in. So leaving aside newspaper economics and the law of diminishing returns for the moment, what exactly is it that lies behind the Daily Sun‘s astonishing numbers? How does this story begin?
Du Plessis takes the question back to the early ’90s, when he was working as managing editor of the Sowetan under the legendary Aggrey Klaaste. ”Aggrey had this clever thing of ‘nation-building’. I learned there that despite the political angst of the time, and rightly so, there was another layer to the country. The Sowetan was a much more serious paper then.”
Acknowledging the sea change of 1994 – ”which you didn’t have to be a genius to get” — du Plessis jumps to 1997 and his time at Independent Newspapers. ”It started occurring to me that there was room for a new kind of newspaper in South Africa. I was seeing a strong Anglo-American influence, an Oxford or Rhodes Scholar view of the world. Independent’s shareholding structure determined what was in their papers. They had a lot of broadsheets, had just launched Business Report and the Sunday Independent. It struck me there was room for such a thing.”
At Independent he bumped into media researcher Jos Kuper, who was thinking similar thoughts after a trip to India and had convinced the directors to let her investigate further. Du Plessis was appointed to head the project, but ultimately Independent gave it the red light. ”I don’t think they saw as clearly as we did that the country had changed,” says du Plessis of a decision the Irish group could be ruing to this day. ”They were foreign.”
So du Plessis recruited Sampson, who has an MBA, to help out with the business plan, and together the two pounded the pavements looking for a backer. They were rejected by commercial banks, investment banks, the Daily Mail group in the UK, even one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, before they finally arrived at Naspers chief Koos Bekker’s door in 2002. ”Bekker got it at once,” says du Plessis. ”He played a significant role in shepherding it through the Naspers board.”
Today the Daily Sun is still a joint venture between du Plessis and Naspers, but that’s about as much as the big guy will reveal. ”I own some and they own some,” he says.
That’s the history. What about the strategy? How much does the Daily Sun take from international tabloids, specifically the most famous of them all, Murdoch’s UK Sun?
Du Plessis gives an example of a headline that one of his subs thought up when Bafana Bafana star Mark Fish was hit on the head at a soccer game. ”’Battered Fish’. That’s a perfect Sun headline, it’s brilliant, but it would not work here.” Sampson elaborates. ”We discovered from day one that you could not take great ideas from the rest of the world and just translate them to South Africa.”
Their claim is that the similarities between the Daily Sun and Murdoch’s Sun begin and end in the tabloid shape – which is not to imply that the men are disavowing an attention-grabbing editorial agenda, just that what appeals locally is markedly different (although they do concede that television is taken for ”real life” by both sets of readers). Down here, the prime objective is capturing the attention of a uniquely South African ”working class hero”. Du Plessis calls him ”the man in the blue overall”, and he’s seriously considering commissioning a statue of the guy to put on display in the newsroom.
This focus on an individual, on a particular South African who for centuries has been nameless and ignored, is way more than metaphorical. The Daily Sun editorial charter is driven by a long and growing list of things that matter to this person. And if there is one secret to the paper’s record-smashing sales growth, that’s probably it.
”We realised that for 300 or 400 years people never mattered as individuals in this country,” says Sampson. ”They were all groups, stereotypes. That realisation was very pervasive at the time of our launch. We consequently decided to focus on people with names and addresses. ”
Du Plessis cuts in with the observation that, nine times out of 10, the lead on page one is ”about people who nobody ever heard of—this woman, and an astonishing thing that happened to her.” The sources at the Daily Sun are most often the readers themselves, he says. ”We have two people answering phones full-time, and now we need a third.”
The result, Jos Kuper avers, is a deep sense of trust between the Daily Sun and its market. ”That trust is the single ingredient that will build the newspaper going forward.”
But does such trust come at a price? The Daily Sun has sparked a national tabloid revolution that urgently demands to be understood, contextualised, and the efforts of critics and academics look increasingly like protests: tabloids are peddling smut, degrading minority groups, fuelling obsolete superstitions. Do millions in the country really need to read a headline like ”School head in muti scare!”?
”Even Patrice Motsepe toasts his dead relatives when he has a drink,” says Sampson. ”It’s an old township thing my father used to do. This is not bizarre in our world. When there is a suicide by drowning people ask ‘what lurks beneath these waters?’ They can agree with all your sophisticated arguments during the day, but it’s about what our reader goes to bed with.”
What it’s also clearly about is turning South Africa’s traditional newspaper model on its head, getting buy-in from a reader who instinctively rejects the voice of authority found in conventional titles. Western or old school media values count for squat in this new world. Ingo Capraro, editor-in-chief of Daily Sun‘s Afrikaans stablemate Son, summarised it in a few short lines in the Mail & Guardian recently: ”Son tells the story as it happens. Not in the language of the taalstryders, dominees and those longing for the days of political and cultural Afrikaner domination, but the way our readers speak. Our lingo is a ‘seamless’ Afrikaans.”
Like the Daily Sun does in English, Capraro’s paper marries the populist headline with a ”Son gee om” [Son cares] vision and translates it into rocketing sales figures. At almost 199,959 audited copies sold (ABC Jul-Dec 2004), Son‘s growth against the previous year (90,015: ABC Jul-Dec 2003) is the largest of any South African newspaper.
Where Son and Daily Sun do differ is on page three. Du Plessis opens his paper and points to a head-and-shoulders shot of a township mother mourning the loss of her children. ”There’s our page three girl,” he says. Capraro’s inside spread, on the other hand, is McCoy tabloid fare – the kind that gets on people’s tits (ja, well).
But there’s no apology from Capraro, just irreverence. ”Picture this scene in the office of the Groot Sensor,” he writes in that Mail & Guardian piece, after declaring that most complaints come from old ”Broeders” and moralisers of the Dutch Reformed Church. ”’These ous at die Son must be communist agitators. Just look at this topless girl (nogal nie ‘n sleg paar tiete nie, Koos) they want to put on page three. A coloured, magtig! And this while they also have white readers.”’
Throwing deft jabs at the old guard is one way to do it. Andrew Gill, publisher of Sowetan and Sunday World, prefers to distance his daily from the ”down and dirty” image that, he says, commentators and critics apply across all tabloids. ”Our strategy on Sowetan is to create a quality tabloid. You can go back to your Limpopo stories about snakes and rocks if you want to. I can’t interview the snake and I can’t interview the rock.”
Since Johncom took over the Sowetan last year, the goal has been to rejuvenate the title’s heritage and increase penetration in the LSM 4 to 7 market. ”We did a huge amount of research into what had gone wrong,” says Gill. ”People told us we were no longer covering relevant issues in a relevant way. Six to nine months down the line you have a different looking Sowetan with different content treatment, but it’s a treatment that goes back to what the newspaper was. The tradition under Klaaste, for example. We had a strong voice in the community, and we’ve gone back to that as a basic principle.”
How this plays out in the next set of figures is yet to be revealed – Sowetan‘s 122,825 average sales (ABC Jul-Dec 2004) are a long way off the giant – but Gill maintains that he needs advertising to follow him as he grows, and that he ”won’t jeopardise the newspaper on an ego trip to be the biggest this or that.” Still, he says, higher circulation is a key objective. ”We’re sitting at between 30,000 and 40,000 sales a day better and you will see growth in June [Jan-Jun ABCs].”
Bringing up business models and revenue generation, Gill stresses there are two ways to tackle this market. ”Take the UK Sun, which has a circulation three times that of the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail probably gets three times the advertising.”
The intended parallels are obvious. At a cover price of R1.30 there’s been much industry speculation about Daily Sun‘s profitability, although du Plessis maintains his title has been comfortably in the black for a while and Sampson denies that the law of diminishing returns (in newspaper economics: when more copy sales results in less advertising revenue) is anywhere near kicking in. Looking at the only figures available, an estimate from Nielsen Media Research [see table], Daily Sun‘s main body is at about R85-million against Sowetan‘s R90-million for the year April 2004 to March 2005, with the Sowetan‘s supplements pegged at a further R12-million. Right now that’s nowhere near ”three times the advertising”, but as with the circulation numbers it’s still too early to gauge the merits of Gill’s strategy.
On the other AdEx figures, aside from Daily Sun‘s 95% growth on the previous year, perhaps the most revealing are the Citizen’s, which leads the pack at R112-million despite the fact that its circulation has been plummeting while it finalises an answer to its competitors (ABC figures for July to December 2004 dropped 22,000 on the previous year to 76,183). Adding to the new money coming into the sector are Son and the two Sunday tabloids, Sunday Sun and Sunday World, which have all grown revenues substantially off the previous year’s low base.
The cause of the revenue surge is plain enough to du Plessis. ”LSM 4 and 5 income has quadrupled in a very short space of time, our launch has coincided with that realisation.” In one of his recent emails to the media industry, he included a few quotes on the subject from a Sunday Times article: ”new research shows that more than two million ‘working class’ people have escaped poverty since 1998 to swell the ranks of the lower middle class”; ”banks and retailers are focusing on the LSM 5’s and 6’s R160-billion-a-year spending power.”
The political power of this market is equally explosive. Tony Blair well understands why he needs to do regular evening cocktails with tabloid editors: these guys hold major sway over UK popular opinion. While it seems unlikely that President Mbeki will do the same any time soon, all politicians would do well to note that the South African Police have started taking statements in the Daily Sun interview room because readers feel that is the only way their grievances will be heard.
A scary thought for some is that the potential of South Africa’s tabloids is only just beginning to be unleashed. It may not always be pretty but it’s getting more powerful, and the message from du Plessis could not be clearer. ”We’re hard as nails. We’re like our market. Don’t give us any shit, we’ll come for you. We stand for the guy in the blue overall.”