The first couple of minutes of the interview with Mathatha Tsedu, editor of City Press, one of Naspers’ oldest English-language newspapers, are spent trying to convince him to take off his trademark cap and glasses for photographs. He refuses, adamant that this is how most people know him.
It is difficult to talk about the seasoned journalist without mentioning the circumstances under which he left the Sunday Times in 2003 where he was editor for 15 months. More recently, the gruesome murder of his son Avhatakali Netshisaulu last December made him a topic of conversation around the dinner table.
But today, Tsedu is in a good mood. This year’s first quarter of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) results show his newspaper to have exceeded the 200,000 mark – 184,653 if you only consider single sales copies and subscriptions.
This is a coup he has been working towards ever since he took over the newspaper from Vusi Mona in February 2004.
Mona lost credibility in many circles after giving testimony before the Hefer Commission of Inquiry into allegations, published in the City Press, claiming that former Scorpions boss Bulelani Ngcuka was an Apartheid spy. The allegations are yet to be substantiated.
Tsedu knows much about dented reputations. When he was dismissed from Johnnic Communications (Johncom), the publisher of Sunday Times, the then chief executive office of the media group, Connie Molusi, said he had been fired for incompetence and failure to fulfil his contractual obligations which included growing the newspaper’s circulation.
Tsedu, on the other hand, insisted it was because the board of Johncom refused to share or even support his vision to transform the newspaper into an “African product” – allegations the media giant denied.
“It’s not even about having enough black people in your staff, it’s about the stories they are writing. The Sunday Times was not reflecting its readers in its content. Black people didn’t see themselves in it. I tried to make the newspaper comfortable for the majority of its readers who are black and when I did that, I was told I was dumbing it down.
“It was quite a painful experience actually to be engaged in a fight with Connie who is an old friend and comrade. But that was then, and it has passed.”
Tsedu is the first to admit that Naspers/Media24 took a chance when they employed him to rebuild City Press which at the time had a circulation of no more than 145,000, and was on a downward trend.
“This job provided me with the opportunity to be almost tested as to whether indeed I am as incapable as was alleged. That’s why I think the guy who hired me was taking a risk, because what if I was incapable?” he says laughingly. The man who hired Tsedu was Jan Malherbe, the now retired head of Media24 newspaper division.
In the three years that Tsedu has been editor of City Press, the paper has undergone a complete make-over. In 2005 it re-launched and proclaimed itself as “distinctly African” with cheeky billboards across the country of some the continent’s icons in sports, business and politics.
In a country where its citizens are still at trying to find their identities, there has been a lot of contention and little consensus on the definition of an African.
“Distinctly African means we are totally committed to this country and continent where we report what is happening truthfully. We don’t only report what is happening here but also in the world. We want to show that there are good things that happen here and we believe we should be the first to tell them, the same with the bad news.
“The idea is that we don’t want to rely on the likes of Reuters, AFP (Agence France-Presse) for copy – as those are often interested in the blood and gore of Africa.”
This is why, says Tsedu, City Press has bureaux in seven of the country’s nine provinces and makes use of Media24’s Africa Desk with its offices in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“It’s almost like going back to what (anti-apartheid activist) Steve Biko said: ‘Blackness is the attitude of mind and way of life’,” he observes, explaining his definition of an African.
“If you are at peace with yourself and your continent, you are an African. It doesn’t matter whether you are pink, purple, white or black. Our market is also not necessarily black. It’s for Africans – people who want to know about what is happening on our continent.”
Tsedu recently became a victim of the country’s biggest and most reported on social ill – crime – which is affecting the international community’s perception of South Africa.
In December, his son Avhatakali, was found burnt to death in the boot of his car. Initially, police thought it was a hijacking gone wrong.
“My son was a very special boy. I had him while I was in high school. I didn’t bring him up. He was brought up by his mother and step-father. We re-united when he was 17-years-old so I carry a sense of guilt that I wasn’t there when he was young and that his life couldn’t have been a bed of roses, raised by another man. When he came, we developed a close relationship, we were like friends.”
Almost every Sunday, City Press carries a story that highlights the plight of a society in a rural or crime-affected area.
Asked why the newspaper didn’t lead with the story of his son’s murder when other media did, Tsedu pauses, putting his feet on the table before he answers.
“If we were to publish it, it needed to be very balanced— so that I’m not seen to be using or abusing my power as the editor.”
A “political animal” whose interest in news and politics is almost unappeasable, Tsedu’s serious nature and political heaviness is evident in his newspaper – something he says he is aware of and trying to remedy.
“If there’s a weakness in us, it is that we are sometimes too serious. It’s a struggle that I have to say no, no we have to have something light on page one, but we don’t do enough of that. It’s a weakness that we ourselves have identified,” he says.
Tsedu entered journalism in the late 1970s quite by chance, he confesses. After matriculating he could not afford to pursue his dreams of becoming a doctor and held down several jobs to make a living. That included a stint as a bus driver and teaching religion in high school, where he says he only taught the book of Exodus as it spoke about slavery. His first job in journalism was as a newspaper vendor 29 years ago.
“I complained to the editor at that time that I wasn’t selling enough newspapers because there was no news about Pietersburg and therefore people were not interested in buying the newspaper.
“He told me they didn’t have anyone to write on Pietersburg and that I could if I wanted to. And so I started and that’s how I got into journalism, by trying to sell newspapers – something I’m still trying to do even today.”
That was almost three decades ago, and Tsedu has accomplished much during that period including his former position as chairman of the South African Editors’ Forum (Sanef) and the All Africa Editors’ Forum which he is very passionate about.
He is also the winner of the Nat Nakasa Award for courageous journalism and was awarded the prestigious Niemann Fellowship in 1996/7.
The move to Naspers:
Asked how a blatant pan-Africanist like him, a product of Biko’s Black Consciousness era, is able to work for a company whose newspapers, especially the Afrikaans-language ones, served as the previous government’s mouthpiece, Tsedu smiles.
“It’s the heaviest of ironies I tell you, that the things I’m doing here I could not do at Sunday Times where the top management were all black – (board chairman) Mashudu Ramano, Connie and (former Johncom executive) Cyril Ramaphosa. I mean, it honestly doesn’t get more politically correct than that.
“In the years that I’ve been here, if I’ve spoken to the guy that hired me about 50 times – 45 of those times it was my initiative because I wanted to find out something or the other. There is no one looking over my shoulder to see what I’m doing, no strange phone calls, nothing like that here. I’ve been given free reign to do what I want provided I meet the terms and conditions of my employment.”
With the market City Press caters for, which is predominantly the growing black middle-class, what challenges does he encounter in trying to serve its changing tastes?
“We produce our product for our own market. Our own reality is that where the Sunday Times, for example, might have a situation that 70 percent of its readers are black and 30 percent white, we don’t have that.
“The Sunday Times has a high breed of readership that necessitates and dictates how you treat stories. Let’s take the situation of the Bulls versus the Sharks. We would not treat that as big as the Pirates and Chiefs in a cup final. If the two were to take place on the same weekend, for the Sunday Times it’s a huge dilemma, for me it’s not.”
He says while City Press would not have bothered reporting on the rugby 10 years ago, today the newspaper understands that there are those among its readers who enjoy the game and that they need to cater for those new tastes in black society.
City Press is turning 25 years old this year and to commemorate this, it is launching a project called ‘My South Africa’ which deals with people’s mindsets.
“What we are trying to do with this project is change the way people see their country. We want them to take ownership of it, and take pride in the things that they have and not destroy them. For example, you would get a man who would throw rubbish out of his car while driving. Why do that? Or someone who would go to a school in his township and then remove the roof so he can go use the zinc plates to build himself a shack. Yet the person’s child goes to that school and will be affected.”
What can we expect from him in future? Tsedu says the time will come to hand over the reigns.
So is he retiring? “Not really, but maybe it is time for someone younger to take over the management of the newspaper leaving me time to concentrate on other things such as mentoring new talent,” he rounds off.