The country’s biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times, is rumoured to be planning a new daily title, but is keeping tight-lipped. But media insiders say the project is well under way, with a launch possible as early as Easter.
Sources say the new paper, to be titled the Daily Times, will be distributed free of charge to Sunday Times subscribers, giving it an immediate circulation of 80Â 000 copies. This would put it ahead of the Citizen, which boasts 71Â 432 copies, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The paper would, at least initially, be a regional Gauteng paper, rather than a national publication, in a tabloid format.
The weekly apparently put together a team late last year with a view to launching around Easter of this year. Commentators agreed that the Sunday Times would be unlikely to go ahead with a project that wasn’t expected to succeed.
“It is potentially a brilliant idea,” said Wits journalism professor Anton Harber. The daily would “almost immediately be financially viable with automatic readership … It would be a readership they already know and have a relationship with.”
The big question, Harber said, “is an editorial one. Daily papers have a very different process, cycle and rhythm to a weekly.”
Harber said the Daily Times offered a potential challenge to all dailies, including Business Day, which, like the Sunday Times, is owned by Johnnic Communications. “It depends on the package,” he said.
Other media experts said the papers most likely to be affected would be The Star and the Citizen, which aim for a similarly middle-class readership. Gillian Jones, associate publisher of The Media magazine, said she did not think it would compete with the Daily Sun‘s readership. “There’s been lots of rumours, but nothing confirmed. They’ve been very cagey about it.”
Jones said she was concerned about the distribution. “Delivering on a daily basis to subscribers with a huge footprint is a huge task,” she said, commenting that the short-lived daily Nova failed because it wasn’t able to solve the distribution problem.
“I hope they do it. The more we have out there, the better,” she said.
But media buyer Harry Herber expressed reservations. Although the Sunday Times has the highest revenue of any newspaper in the country, and advertising space within its pages fills up very quickly, any new project would not be a guaranteed success. “It would not be a big newspaper at all, and subscriptions are primarily in Gauteng, where you have many daily papers to choose from. The fact that such a paper is endorsed by the Sunday Times is a strength, but it’s no guarantee.”
Herber said advertisers desperate to get into the pages of a national mass-market paper would not be satisfied with the offer of space in a free, limited regional paper.
Ray Hartley, currently deputy editor at the Sunday Times, is said to be the Daily Times‘s new editor. When approached for comment, his secretary said: “He cannot do any interviews or talks because it hasn’t been announced.”
Hoosen Kolia, general manager of the Sunday Times, said: “We have a hundred plans at any one time, we look at all sorts of things. If there will be an announcement, it will happen soon. But I honestly can’t say yea or nay.”
Owned by Johnnic Communications, the Sunday Times has the highest revenue in the country, with sales in excess of 500Â 000 copies nationally. “It is a cash-printing machine,” commented Harber.