Publisher Deon du Plessis likes to see newspapers as pure business. I first heard him warm to the theme more than 10 years back. It was a workshop debating ”the role of the media in the new South Africa”.
His take, seemingly crass at the time, was very simple. The role was nothing more than to make money. Like every business, it was a matter of customising the commodity for what the market wanted.
As everyone now knows, Du Plessis went on to invent the Daily Sun. It targeted township residents with a formula that made it the best-selling daily in South African history.
What helped the Sun succeed was the decision by Saki Macozoma, then owner of the Sowetan, to vacate the township terrain and take his venerable title into suburbia. The Macozoma strategy in effect took the Sowetan out of Soweto, aiming to follow the migrating middle class.
The predictable outcome was that the Sowetan lost its black, working-class readers. But it also struggled to secure the departing buppies. Macozoma later sold to Johncom, which sent the Sowetan back to regain the readers scored by the Sun.
Today, Du Plessis not only sits pretty on the Sowetan‘s old (and enlarged) market; he’s now pursuing the newly suburbanised sector that Macozoma’s Sowetan had hoped to serve. Du Plessis’s strategy is Nova — a new paper launched by Media24 three weeks ago.
Macozoma’s paper had wanted to serve the topmost layers of the black elite, assuming a continuing primary identity of ”blackness” there to trade upon. Du Plessis, however, is targeting a less well-off income group, and an explicitly more multiracial audience as well.
Racial positions
The old Sowetan covered ”black” issues, believing that readers would stay in touch with their roots. In contrast, Nova ignores the past by focusing on a ”grey” townhouse culture that assimilates blackness in a way that fades it into transparency.
Indeed, there’s no township news in the paper. If you came from there, it’s left behind. If you’ve never been to a township, there’s no need to read about it.
Although the paper aspires to be colour-blind, many would say it is still disproportionately white — as, in fact, is its target market. The paper is geared to a ”Midrand” middle class of younger people said to be comprised in equal thirds of Afrikaans-speaking whites, English-speaking whites and English-speaking Africans.
What’s noteworthy is that the paper avoids subjects that might encourage its readers to take up racial positions. Not for them the right-wing white slant of The Citizen, nor the non-racial tone of The Star — its two closest rivals. Instead, Nova seeks to offer an ”a-racial” menu with preference given to class-oriented content.
Yet, while Macozoma’s Sowetan was big on black economic empowerment, Nova treats class as cross-racial personal finance and middle-class consumption. For example, the paper assumes you hold a bank account and will enjoy a story that compares costs for drawing cash at various ATMs. Likewise, you need to be a car owner to connect with stories like ”’Ditch your cars’ — MEC” and ”No escape from speed cameras”.
It’s not only the class focus that characterises Nova‘s content. The mix is also bland. It is a publication for people who don’t want to deal with ugly things, and whose lives don’t force them to confront such problems very often. Thus, the only stories about conflict are on the sports pages. Politics and religion barely feature. In the first 10 editions, there seemed to be only one story mentioning HIV.
‘New-paper’
All this makes Nova neither emotionally nor intellectually demanding. The content has a stamp of superficiality to it, and the field of vision is about as wide as the view from a townhouse kitchenette. Reinforcing all this is the super-accessible layout — quick-scan ”fact boxes” rather than any long and taxing think-pieces.
In sum, this newspaper really is a ”new-paper”. Its no-stress news is certainly different to that of other South African newspapers. With Nova, you never have to worry.
Du Plessis reportedly wants to sell between 40 000 and 50 000 a day to start with. That figure is ambitious because he hopes the bulk of the buyers will be people who don’t click with existing papers.
This is man with a proven knack for spotting a gap in the market. Now, with Nova, the issue is: can he create a market in that gap?
The first challenge is whether he can indeed find a race-free readership, given that South Africa is a society sizzling with culture clashes that correspond to skin colours — not to mention still being scarred with racial tensions.
A second test is whether this audience will include the growing black middle class, and therefore attract the advertising needed for profitability.
If Du Plessis wins the first challenge, it will show an astonishing triumph of class over race. Winning the second one will show that newspapers (as distinct from other media) can be a vibrant means to deliver audiences, and especially the black middle class, to advertisers.
If Du Plessis succeeds in both challenges, he’ll also have proved something else. This will be his theory that newspapers are merely commodities, and that you don’t need lofty purposes added to the business.
In a normalising country, there might just be space for that kind of venture.