The runaway best single entry in this year’s Community Press Awards for headline writing was The Lowvelder‘s Mark Kinnear for ”Don’t forget World Alzheimer’s Day”. Not likely, with a reminder like that.
As unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry is the investigative journalism of Buks Viljoen, business editor of the same paper — earlier this year he got his own big prize, the R15Â 000 Nat Nakasa Award, for uncovering racism at rugby’s highest levels and for exposing a crooked Mpumulanga municipal manager.
There’s also Jacci Babich of the Sandton Chronicle to consider, who uses her ”little old lady” facade to tee up city officials before slamming them deep out of bounds.
Tons more examples are out there, but some memory capacity should probably be left over for the following revealing fact: the community press annual awards event is the only one where prizes for editorial and advertisements are given on the same night.
Perhaps better than any other media sector, South Africa’s community newspapers manage to not only keep editorial and advertising talking, they manage to keep them flourishing in one another’s company. (The winners for best ads this year were easily in the same league as the above, one example being a quarter-page spread for a butcher in the East Rand called ”Meat World”, which had a cigar-smoking, shades-wearing cow asking, ”You want a piece of me?”).
It’s the local thing that works here, the neighbourhood-orientated ”everybody-knows-your-name” approach that bags the inside scoop when ”Faulty freezer gets customer hot under collar” (from the Southern Mail, seriously), and so gets the residents’ tongues wagging, and so gets the corner shops advertising.
Things have been going so good, in fact, that according to Nielsen Media Research adspend on community and regional newspapers rose 68% in the year to June 2004 against the same period the year before — this against a corresponding rise in mainstream newspapers and magazines of ”only” 18%.
Put another way, as The MediaShop group managing director Harry Herber recently explained (The Media, September 2004), the rural and freesheet sector ”jointly attract around 22% of all press money, with over R100-million in loose inserts.”
The most up-to-date figure, for the year September 2003 to August 2004 on all the community newspapers covered by Nielsen’s, is R867,9-million. That’s a whole lot of local retailers.
As for the financial upside on the titles themselves, Nielsen’s AdEx reveals that the top revenue earner for the period September 2003 to August 2004 is the Fourways Review at an incredible R54,9-million. The rest of the titles in the top five are Sandton Chronicle (R23,2-million), Benoni City Times (R22,5-million), Boksburg Advertiser (R22-million) and Vaal Ster (R19,1-million).
Just to put some perspective on that, the mainstream weekly City Press attracted advertising revenue of about R59,8-million last year, with Sunday World and Sunday Sun taking R12,3-million and R6,7-million respectively.
It would seem, with numbers like these, that there’s nothing at all ”marginalised” about the community press. Another point to consider is that many community newspapers are sold, and still return very respectable circulations for the size of the markets in which they distribute — the Rustenburg Herald, for instance, sells at R2Â 00 and has an ABC of 19Â 008, and the Paarl Post & Wellington Gazette at R3Â 50 has a figure of 16Â 639 (Jan – Jun 2004).
But what we’re essentially dealing with on most of the titles mentioned above is the position of the conglomerates. There’s a growing number of small, independent publishers in South Africa that come nowhere close to being mainstream.
The disparity is best reflected by the recent dissolution of the Community Press Association (CPA), which was formed 126 years ago ”to use collective muscle to develop solutions to economic and structural challenges facing small media entrepreneurs”.
In the last few years of the CPA’s existence it had been dominated by Caxton, Independent Newspapers and Media 24, who between them publish the vast majority of South Africa’s community newspapers (Caxton alone own four of the top five revenue earners).
These three groups are part of the 120 members that have officially left the association to join the Newspaper Association of South Africa (NASA).
As Business Day commented when the split became apparent: ”while [the CPA] aims to represent the interests of all owners of community newspapers, smaller publishers claim they are often sidelined as the big players—work to protect their interests, rather than those of the entire industry.”
Of course, given the number of titles owned by Caxton and Independent (78 of the former CPA’s total 166), as well as their control with Media24 of the newspaper printing market, using ”collective muscle” for bulk deals on procurement had become a redundant exercise.
The solution for independent publishers was the formation of the Association of Independent Publishers of Southern Africa (AIPSA) in September this year.
The new section 21 body, falling under Print Media South Africa (PMSA), incorporates the old CPA and Independent Media Alliance (IMA), and ”will seek to become the primary clearinghouse for research, policy debate, and the setting of industry standards for the grassroots media sector—[it will] also aggressively lobby on publishers’ behalf.”
As part of the merger process the CPA and IMA conducted a mini census last month, polling 58 independent publishers. Amongst other findings, it was revealed that 70% of the publishers operate as commercial for-profit entities, yet 60% have no access to national advertising representation.
The census report pointed out that the 58 publishers surveyed jointly produce 1,1-million copies per edition, and ”are only a fraction of the estimated 250 grassroots publishers currently in the market”.
So, acknowledging that ”the greatest challenge facing independent publications is access to advertising”, AIPSA has identified as a key flagship project the formation of advertising procurement agencies – under the IMA banner it is currently piloting two regional agencies in KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo.
Another flagship project is the formation of production syndicates: ”As the MDDA [Media Development and Diversity Agency] can attest, the second greatest challenge is the lack of technical production skills amongst emergent publishers. IMA has teamed emergent publishers with more experienced small publishers in pilot syndicates in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga.”
As indicated, AIPSA also performs a ”lobbying” function. A major issue recently has been the ”unfair competition” from state-funded or backed municipal newspapers. The report points out that the ”IMA successfully lobbied—to transform these publications into NGO-type ‘public media’ that would’ve given them access to donor funding.”
Ultimately, the success of these initiatives will only be revealed by the number of grassroots publishers that manage to survive in a world dominated by giant players (the state included).
With luck, at next year’s awards some of the small guys will be able to apply one of this year’s winning headlines to themselves: ”It’s been a bumper (to bumper) season”.