The publication of Nova, the four-and-a-half-month-old daily newspaper from the Media24 stable based in Johannesburg, is to be suspended, a statement from Red Ink Publishing on behalf of Nova said on Wednesday.
Nova was aimed at young, high-income urban professionals. Although positive comments were received on its editorial content, sales figures were not up to expectations.
Its publisher, Deon du Plessis, said: ” In terms of content and style, the paper was well received; it was seen as innovative. Research showed that most people in the target market enjoyed it when they got it. Some advertisers were beginning to value the paper. But circulation remained flat.
”As to distribution, we had not yet succeeded in reaching sufficient numbers of people in the niche. Converting our target market of high-income non-newspaper-reading metro people to a regular newspaper-reading habit proved difficult.”
Staff members of Nova (in circulation, advertising, administration or editorial departments) will be affected, but most will be placed elsewhere in the group, the statement said.
”We want to make a special gesture towards those subscribers and advertisers who joined us in this experiment. To show how much we valued their custom, we will refund their full contributions,” said Du Plessis.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian Online in September last year, Nova editor Minette Ferreira said: ”[Nova will survive because] the launch of Nova is very much part of Media24’s whole strategy of exploring newspaper readers. If you look at, for instance, the launch of Daily Sun and the launch of Die Son, they went for a market that was not previously reading newspapers, and both of them are now amazingly successful.
Ferreira said Nova would be ”really happy if we start with doing 40 000 to 50 000 [copies] in the first few months”.
”Nova is an integral part of that whole strategy of Media24. This means that we’ve got the full support of Media24 and they are [our] financial back-up. What comes with Media24 are an infrastructure and the knowledge of years and years and years of experience in the newspaper market. They have got the distribution channels and the printing capabilities, all of that,” she said.
”It is a mixture of us and the ideas that we got [with] the back-up that we get from Media24. It’s a recipe for success.”