The first newspaper in South Africa edited by a woman is a sports daily, writes David Shapshak
Sports writers like statistics. Any game has some “first time since …” statistic that can be worked into a story.
This week Bronwyn Wilkinson entered the record books three times. The 32-year-old became the first woman editor, and the youngest, of a major daily newspaper – the country’s first daily sports newspaper.
But she is nonplussed by the attention afforded her as the country’s first woman editor, and more pragmatically concerned with getting the paper out. “There’s a slight novelty to it, I suppose, especially to the other media, which I’m sure will die down. I think the product will be judged as a product.
“It’s a stunning feeling to actually have a newspaper in our hands, after all the dummies and mock-ups,” Wilkinson said on Monday, when Sportsday hit the streets – the first new daily in eight years.
Wilkinson was the country’s first woman sports editor at the Saturday Star, before leaving a promising career at the Independent Group to join Sportsday. Before that she was assistant sports editor jointly for the Saturday Star and Sunday Independent .
Wilkinson comes from a family with a “fanatical interest in sport” and was herself a rower. Her father, Richard Wilkinson, was the president of the South African Rowing Union.
The launch has caused some controversy over whether the South African market can sustain another title, given the way existing daily newspapers are struggling for advertising revenue and the launch last weekend of another new paper, Sunday World. A growing sports awareness and the need for more variety opened the gap for Times Media Limited (TML) to launch Sportsday, says Rob Wicks, the paper’s general manager, himself only 30.
He says sports dailies are hugely successful in France and Spain, where l’Equipe sells 350 000 copies a day and Marca 475 000 copies, while sports sponsorship in South Africa has grown to R1,63-billion annually.
Sportsday is priced at R1,80, 10c more than the Sowetan and 20c more than The Citizen. The paper is hoping to steal its soccer readers from the Sowetan and The Citizen’s racing punters. TML owns 50% of Computaform, the country’s leading racing guide, which will supply Sportsday with its racing pages.
The paper will have bumper editions on Mondays and Fridays and is aiming for sports fans, who will be predominantly male and relatively youthful, with 60% expected to be younger than 35. “But,” says Wilkinson, “if you make sports interesting and more accessible everyone will read it.
“Rather than having the biggest names in sports reporting, like the Dan Retiefs, we have people whose writing suits the paper’s style as much as possible – that of mates sitting in the pub chatting about the game, a very chatty style,” she says.
Top writers like Tony Mashati head up soccer coverage, Peter Robinson cricket and Grant Robbins rugby. It employs a small staff of 35, but also uses a range of freelancers.
One of the advantages of an entire paper dedicated to sport is the luxury of having so much space, says Wilkinson. “Having worked with five pages, to come through and be able to run 24 pages of sport is great. But you have to be careful you’re not missing stuff by concentrating on volume.”
Another luxury is having both front and back pages to use for display purposes, she says. Wilkinson plans to make the read as visual as possible, with graphics interspersed throughout the paper.
Wicks says the ad content is planned to run at 20% to 25%, while they are projecting sales of 35 000 to 40 000 a day in Gauteng initially, then growing the paper in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
Racially 50% of readers will be black, 35% white and 15% coloured and Indian. The paper carries one page of general news, “so the next morning people will feel confident they know the news of the day”.