At the recent Pica Magazine Awards, if you listened carefully, you could hear the hollow thud of standards dropping to the floor. Set up 34 years ago by the forebears of the Magazine Publishers Association of South Africa (MPASA) to acknowledge and promote excellence in local publishing, the annual event has become — to borrow the words of a disillusioned former editor — a “homage to mediocrity”.
The tone for 2003 was set early in the evening, with discredited publisher Highbury Monarch scoring two wins in the customer publishing category. Taking the financial services trophy for Reaching Out and the sports trophy for Sowetan Soccer Guide, Highbury Monarch’s dubious business practices were clearly an irrelevance to the MPASA’s awards committee.
What the committee and judges conveniently ignored was the publishing house’s well-publicised fondness for duping unsuspecting advertisers.
Last year a group of at least six advertisers refused to pay Highbury Monarch for adverts that ran in its Sports Illustrated “swimsuit” issue, as they claimed they were misled into believing they were advertising in the popular SA Sports Illustrated “swimwear” issue, published by Touchline Media. (Highbury Monarch was awarded the licence to publish Sports Illustrated by Time Warner — Touchline Media’s SA Sports Illustrated is a local product.)
On a similar tack an unnamed media director says of Highbury Monarch in The Media magazine’s November edition: “[They] misrepresent titles to unsuspecting clients, saying, for instance, that they’re producing The Official Guide to Cricket World Cup when the cricket guys know nothing of it. It’s only ‘official’ because that’s the title’s name.”
Luckily for Highbury Monarch it can now prove its integrity by attaching the “official” Pica winner’s badge to its covers.
So too can Systems Publishers’s Marketing Mix, which beat the only other entrant in a contested business-to-business category, Primedia Publishing’s Advantage, for the marketing and communications trophy.
This is the same Marketing Mix, some will remember, whose erstwhile editor was lambasted by Robert Kirby in this newspaper for her “nauseating” support of plagiarist Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
Wrote Kirby: “There are strong similarities between the quality of a man and those who cherish and admire him. If he’s surrounded by pandering schlemiels, he’s almost invariably of the category himself.
“For such reasons Bristow-Bovey should be very worried about [the Marketing Mix editor’s] glistening encomia, not only because there is such a thing as damning with too much praise, but because having meathead adoration poured all over one in public is a sure indication of the level at which one’s work is appealing. Who wants to hear the loudest applause coming from the monkey cage?”
Not that the views of one columnist should disqualify a magazine from getting an award. But if there’s a choice between only two titles, and for some reason scratching the category is out of the question, then isn’t the safer bet the magazine that hasn’t openly supported a disgraced smuggler?
The evening held more, though. Beating Financial Mail and Finance Week to take the business trophy in the consumer magazine category was Enterprise, produced by Mafube Publishing.
The same Mafube Publishing whose chairperson, Thami Mazwai, also news sub-committee chief on the SABC board, has been ridiculed by virtually every newspaper in the country for informing the parliamentary committee on communications that objectivity and independence in journalism are empty clichés.
Mazwai has done nothing lately to persuade South Africans that he is not the “government’s voice inside the SABC”.
Daily newspaper ThisDay also reminded us that Mazwai, in his role as Mafube Publishing’s boss, “has regularly received an honourable mention at Cosatu’s Worst Employer Awards”.
Well, he did better than that at the Picas.
Perhaps the only bright spot in an otherwise demoralising evening was the award of the Rossi trophy for best overall consumer magazine to Fair Lady. The Media 24 title had been floundering for years, but under the stewardship of editor Ann Donald it saw a 45% increase in quarterly circulation at the beginning of the year.
Unfortunately for Media 24, a few minutes before the announcement of its justified victory Highbury Monarch’s Sowetan Soccer Guide team had been called up to collect the trophy for best overall customer magazine.
Presumably the awards committee would like to defend themselves. They would most likely want to draw attention to the following, which appears in their glossy winners’ supplement: “Emphasis was placed on the fact that [Pica] is a publishing award, not a journalism, design or printing award.”
Fair enough, but shouldn’t the criteria for a publishing citation include just a little appreciation of the wider context?
In the same supplement the MPASA’s mission statement expresses the belief that through the awards “publishers will aspire to sustain and advance the quality of their titles for the benefit of their readers”.
It’s “official”: the 2003 Pica awards were an insult to readers.
(Disclaimer: The Media magazine could not find the time to complete the entry forms for the Pica awards this year, and will probably again not find the time next year.)
Kevin Bloom is editor of The Media magazine