The South African newspaper market needs no spies to keep a nervous eye on a newcomer armed with 127 000 instant readers. As the Sunday Times‘s daily version, simply titled the Times, gears up for a June launch, its editor, Ray Hartley, is blogging about the birthing pangs and has even posted a sneak preview of a Times front page.
The new, tabloid-format Times is set to focus on breaking news and will, at first, be distributed exclusively to Sunday Times subscribers in metropolitan areas, according to the Sunday paper’s business pages this week. That puts it instantly in circulation competition with other major daily newspapers.
It also plans to use new media to full effect, plying readers with a website, podcasts, cellphone services and more, the report said.
Hartley’s blog may well be a front-runner of this digital strategy. He was quoted in the report as saying that especially younger South Africans consume media from sources other than print.
On his blog, he provides a glimpse of a front-page dummy — a second attempt after the first was ”badly printed, headlines running over too many decks, over-inked, messy … I could go on”, he writes. ”We want the paper to be bright and easy on the eye.”
About 10 members of the Sunday Times staff are set to join Hartley — formerly the deputy editor of that newspaper — in the Times‘s newsroom, and it is also recruiting ”the best in the rest of the newspaper industry”, the weekend report said.