The 100-year-old Pretoria News is still learning new tricks. Janet Smith reports
Gauteng Newspapers managing director Deon du Plessis, editor of The Star Peter Sullivan, the late editor of The Sunday Times Tertius Myburgh, Reuters’ Africa desk chief Lesley Wroughton and former press photographer of the year Nicky de Blois all have one thing in common: they used to work at the Pretoria News.
As it celebrates its centenary this year, the News – as it is affectionately known – can count some of this country’s finest journalists among its alumni, and present editor Alan Dunn believes it is still harvesting a superb crop of young minds for the industry.
Situated in Vermeulen Street among a core of justice buildings and fine restaurants, the Pretoria News – sister paper to Independent Newspapers’ Johannesburg flagship, The Star – has been the meter of the capital city for 100 years of tumultuous history.
Once the bastion of apartheid’s Afrikaner uppercrust, Pretoria is now a city in a scintillating process of genuine transformation, embracing the national political elite, diplomats from all over the world and residents from trendy Hatfield in the east to beloved Atteridgeville in the west. Its only regional English newspaper provides a remarkable history.
”The composition of Pretoria is changing entirely,” Dunn says, ”and as the city confronts the future, so too is the Pretoria News reflecting that. There’s a mood of co-ownership among the residents, a feeling of partnership, and we’re serving all those communities as a catalyst for change.”
Dunn is on a high as the paper for which he has worked on and off for 25 years increases its circulation figures (24 552 in 1996 and all over the country are hankering after: a growing 16-to-24-year- old demographic (now at 26 %).
White readership is currently at 54%, with black readership at 46%, and Dunn is pleased to note that ”the subscribers of tomorrow” – especially younger black and white readers – have responded especially positively to the paper’s independent entertainment pull-out, Interval, which generates most of its own copy and has only two full-time writers on its staff in editor Diane de Beer and her deputy Craig Canavan.
The Pretoria News showed a healthy profit of around R1-million in 1996, the year which not only marked a turning around in fortunes for the paper – strongly rumoured to be on the verge of closing in 1994 when it was compelled to retrench staff and cut costs – but also proved a point among its detractors who were rather more quick to shower praise on the pioneering new brand that was The Cape Times two years ago.
Two editions are produced daily with a comparatively small staff who also bring out the Saturday edition – a paper which has neither its own core of journalists nor its own editor.
Outsiders might imagine that as MD of Gauteng Newspapers, Deon du Plessis would play a weighty role in the nature of editorial in the Pretoria News. Dunn denies this, saying Du Plessis – who edited the paper in the early 1990s –
”carefully avoids editorial interference”, allowing the paper’s own team to dictate news vales, content and opinion.
”He tells us we should aim at the AB income group and that we must be reflective of society, but the rest is up to us.” Under Dunn’s editorship, the newsroom complement has been altered to slowly accommodate affirmative action needs in terms of gender, and to a lesser extent, race. He is especially proud of the fact that the Pretoria News has a woman chief photographer in Patricia Hagen, a woman entertainment editor in De Beer, two women – Yvonne Grimbeek and Tanya Stapelberg – working under recently-appointed news editor Josias Charle on the newsdesk, and a woman deputy chief sub-editor in Valerie Boje. Of the 10 reporters in the newsroom, seven are women and the production staff is equally divided along gender lines.
While the promotion of women has been downplayed with a disappointing understanding of the nature of affirmative action on other newspapers, including those in the Independent group, Dunn is informally praised by his female staff for showing a more liberated approach to recruitment.
The paper was also considerably boosted by the arrival in 1995 of Dennis Cruywagen from the SABC in the post of deputy editor. Staff say they have come to regard Cruywagen as not only their editorial mentor, but also a powerful force for good human relations in the newsroom and beyond.
Cruywagen confides that the management style of the Pretoria News has ”brought us closer to our colleagues — if you hope to lead and manage people, you must be seen to be rolling up your sleeves”.
In celebrating its centenary year, the Pretoria News has planned a couple of gala events, black-tie dinners and a city family gathering. There is also talk of a 100-page supplement documenting the newspaper’s position in its community over a century of history.
In terms of commercial initiatives, the paper last week introduced a junk-mail service which offers free advertisements to private individuals. Dunn describes advance notices on this innovation as ”barnstorming” – and in a city where competition between newspapers is decidedly stiff, that could prove to be an understatement.
”Our biggest challenge now is aliteracy,” Dunn tells. ”People need to be making more use of newspapers where many of them rely almost completely on electronic media today. We want to be their paper of choice in this city.”