With much change occurring in the print industry, editors have been playing the game of job-swapping, writes Jacquie Golding-Duffy
Nineteen-ninety-six was the year of musical chairs in the media – particularly in the print media, where editors changed jobs in double-quick time.
The game began in March when the then-Cape Argus newspaper’s long-serving editor, Andrew Drysdale, retired after 36 years with the company, and was replaced by the golden boy of Independent Newspapers, 36-year-old Shaun Johnson, launch editor of the Sunday Independent and editor of the Saturday Star.
While Johnson was shifting his base to Cape Town, Independent Newspapers shipped in London’s Financial Times home-desk editor Peter Bruce (43) to head the Star’s business supplement, Business Report. A gung-ho Bruce attacked his rival, Business Day, accusing it of being “fat, lazy … and complacent”.
A replacement for Johnson wasn’t easy. It took months before the Independent announced its new editor: the self-proclaimed “son of the African soil”, John Battersby, a respected writer who had been covering the Middle East for The Christian Science Monitor.
Meanwhile, ABC circulation figures were playing a rather subdued tune. They revealed that the print industry was in a bit of trouble, with newspaper figures for weeklies and dailies free-falling, although the major print stables were faring marginally better than others.
Some of the trouble was self-inflicted. Times Media Limited (TML) – publishers of Business Day, the Sunday Times, Financial Mail and other titles – started experiencing rumblings of change. Editors got the jitters at the prospect of new black owners and began vigorously mooting an editorial charter in a bid to “preserve age-old traditions” which had allegedly been upheld by its former custodian, Anglo American.
As panic swept the hallways of the TML offices, the group’s long-serving editor, Ken Owen, was packing up for good, retiring just when he’d said, years earlier, he intended to retire.
The Sunday Times editor was profiled by former Mail & Guardian writer Mark Gevisser as “South Africa’s last great white editor”.
His retirement, writes Gevisser, was welcomed at the time by some colleagues who felt empathy for the grumpy icon and those who wished he would just clear off.
Clear off he did – to be replaced by the modest and seemingly quiet Brian Pottinger, who had a completely different management style to his domineering predecessor.
Pottinger’s deputy was a highly trumpeted “black appointment”, Mike Robertson, whose sister, Heather Robertson, secured a senior position in Elle magazine, newly acquired by Times Media.
A major sector of the magazine market was faring no better than newspapers. ABC figures (Elle did not feature as it was new in the market) showed a dramatic drop in circulation among Republican Press’s magazine, Personality, and other “women’s” magazines such as Femina and Fair Lady which cater largely for the white market.
In contrast to the poor figures displayed among mainly white magazines, black glossies such as Drum, True Love and Bona gained readers.
The plummeting sales in skin magazines such as Penthouse, Hustler and Scope were also recorded in the ABC circulation figures. A month after the figures were released, Scope closed down, signalling the end of an era after 30 years of publishing.
A couple of months later, Playboy followed suit.
In August, Beeld was saying goodbye to its outgoing editor, Willie Kuhn, making way for Johan de Wet. De Wet, a journalist for more than 35 years, was referred to as “not the proverbial ranting editor, but a man with iron balls”.
He left City Press after five months to head the Afrikaans daily and was adamant that he would not bow to politics but would be led by the news. At the age of 61, De Wet said he would be at the helm of the newspaper for only two years.
Perhaps the oddest credenza was the Financial Mail/Finance Week affair.
As the TML ownership changed, the Financial Mail’s editor-at-large, David Gleason, jumped ship and bought rival Finance Week, whose long-time editor Stuart Murray resigned under circumstances never actually explained.
Shortly afterward, Financial Mail editor Nigel Bruce followed Gleason and became Finance Week editor – much to the horror of TML’s management, considering Bruce had been with the firm for 21 years, 11 of them at the Financial Mail helm.
The game of musical chairs came full circle when TML looked around for someone to replace Nigel Bruce as Financial Mail editor – and found Peter Bruce, who agreed to leave Business Report and take up the Financial Mail challenge.
The two editors most observers expected to join the game – seventy-odd-year-old Johnny Johnson of The Citizen and The Star’s Peter Sullivan – stayed put.
But the deal of the year involved businessmen, not editors. Cyril Ramaphosa and the National Empowerment Consortium now own TML, with Ramaphosa as chair of Johnnic. Pearsons, the owner of the Financial Times in Britain, now owns 50% of TML’s business titles, Business Day and Financial Mail.