Ferial Haffajee
Newspaper magnate Tony O’Reilly jetted into South Africa this week for a regular inspection of his African interests – no doubt he will also make time to heal an important relationship.
President Nelson Mandela’s December attack in Mafikeng on foreign-owned media and its abiding white management could not have gone down well with his Irish friend, whose Independent Newspaper Holdings group has worked hard to position its papers as establishment voices, closely allied to the new political power.
Now O’Reilly must persuade Mandela at dinner next Thursday night of the credentials of his group. He will also go armed with news of a programme for change called Independent 2000, which plans to finally shrug off the company’s Waspish culture and change its racial make-up.
O’Reilly’s task shouldn’t be hard: he’s used to rubbing shoulders with power and Mandela’s government needs an ally in the press in the run-up to a second, more challenging election. Independent Newspapers has 14 titles with about four million readers.
The group’s most senior appointments in the past three years include editors drawn from the African National Congress tradition, while its group editorial training chief, Chris Vick, previously served as communications chief in former Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale’s office. Now those appointees, under the hand of group editorial director Shaun Johnson, have sculpted the millennium plan which aims to bring deeper change of a darker hue.
Says Vick: “This is a critical year for Independent Newspapers. Management on its own cannot ensure continued growth. It must listen to the state’s criticism, it must listen to its readers and it must capture new markets.”
That is just what the government has been saying. The group’s new parliamentary editor, Zubeida Jaffer, thumbs her nose at critics who claim the group is too close to the ANC.
A former detainee, Jaffer says: “I get quite annoyed and angry when people make glib comments. They don’t level the same accusations at journalists who support the Democratic Party; but if you’re close to the ANC, it has an impact on your objectivity.
“I see our role as both the court jester and the imbongi [praise singer],” she says of her parliamentary team.
Newspapers in the stable are looking more like supporters of the new establishment, though Professor Guy Berger of Rhodes University’s journalism department says: “There’s a perception that the new leadership has tamed journalists and made them ANC yes-men, but I see no evidence of obsequious and sycophantic journalism.”
To fashion the basket of quality and popular newspapers the group wants will take great investment, and some staff believe there is not enough commitment to this.
New management has breathed life into the group and turned around the old Argus company, which was deep in the red when O’Reilly bought a stake in 1994. Turnover and profits are up, though Independent’s chief executive Ivan Fallon says: “The return to date has been less than Independent would get from simply placing its money in a South African bank and drawing interest on it.”
The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show circulation is up for 11 of the group’s 13 newspapers, though that comes off a low base as newspaper sales have been in long-term decline.
Healthy profits have not been won without the kind of belt-tightening and restructuring exercises so common under late 20th-century capitalism. Staff members report there are “Irish bean-counters” in the newsrooms to help achieve the profit margins. These margins are under pressure as the fall in the rand means it is more expensive to meet targets. Managers imported from the parent company have a mandate to cut the fat and make people work better with existing resources.
The flip side of that coin is what one manager calls a “slash-and-burn approach to newsroom management”. Many newsrooms are staffed by juniors because they cannot afford to pay more senior journalists, while the newspapers have little investigative capacity.
A news editor reports there is little they can do to hold on to talented black staff, who are beating a path to Times Media Limited which is offering far higher salaries.
But for Johnson, things are on the right track. He argues that Independent is the only group which has started new titles and created a significant number of jobs.
However, a project which would have brought a new black market – a daily tabloid – remains on the drawing board months after it was first announced.
Independent Newspaper Holdings is also caught up in the clashes of change as the old and new guards tussle for turf control.
At its heart is a multi-million-rand pension dispute and the Independent 2000 plan, which white staff fear will scupper their career advancement, but which some black staff say is too little, too late. Independent 2000 is a change plan which could replace an existing affirmative action policy negotiated with all trade unions.
The new draft plan “enhances” existing policies, says Johnson. “What we are saying is we want to achieve a measurably more representative company. There have been a lot of changes, but we’ve got a helluva long way to go.”
White staff are feeling the heat, and racial tension has reached fever-pitch in at least one newsroom, with white males leaving in great numbers.
Trade unions complain that the race to change means their powers have been stripped. Whereas the previous policy gave them joint decision-making power and veto rights, Independent 2000 could take that away.
Some black journalists have cautiously welcomed the new plan; they believe change must seep more deeply into the passages of power.
The group has appointed three black editors, two black deputy editors and a number of women to editorial executive posts. Now staff want to see changes in the power centres of finance, sales, advertising and circulation, and at the group’s mahogany row.
One of the ways would be to finance a voluntary retrenchment scheme, which many staff claim is the thinking behind pension fund changes. Management last week announced it would take a pension fund contribution “holiday” which would save it R13-million – a saving some believe may be used to fund plans to make the company more representative.
Fallon said: “The matter is an internal financial one, and I have no intention of discussing it. Nor will anyone else in the company.”
What the group will discuss is the honorary doctorate for service to South African journalism which O’Reilly will receive from Rhodes University on Wednesday evening.
The announcement of this honour has been met with more than a few raised eyebrows. Media commentators ask: what about Zwelakhe Sisulu, Aggrey Klaaste, Zubeida Mayet, Ameen Akhalwaya (posthumously), Allister Sparks?
“There’s always next year and the year after,” says Berger. He says the honour is part of the department’s plan to move closer to the media industry. With a firm grasp of realpolitik, that means moving closer to the bucks at a time when tertiary institutions face funding squeezes.
O’Reilly is probably also going to put his hands into his deep pockets in return for what his representatives call “just one of about half a dozen honorary doctorates”.
— Additional reporting by Marion Edmunds