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Staying ahead: An interview with Shaun Johnson
by Carolyn Esser
Shaun Johnson is currently Group Editorial Director of the Independent Newspapers group. He was deeply involved in the development of the alternative press in South Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in his role as assistant editor of the Weekly Mail. He has been editor of a number of prominent publications including the Cape Argus, The Sunday Independent and The Saturday Star. Carolyn Esser talks to him.
CE: What does your job entail?
SJ: I’m a newspaper person. I just love ink on paper, so what I’ve been involved in is trying to modernise our practices. In order to do this, you need someone who has a very strong editorial background. We have got … 14 major mainstream titles and we’ve got dozens of community papers. I sit in a coordinating role in the middle of that. Every Wednesday for about an hour and a half I sit in video conferencing with all the editors in the group and we talk about everything that is happening. You need somebody in this position, facilitating the whole thing, because editors, quite rightly, are very territorial about their own paper.
CE: Tell us about the Argus make-over.
SJ: In the case of the Argus, you have a newspaper that had been successful for 140 years. What happened was that a formula that had been so successful for all that time finally ran out of time. the Argus … felt out of kilter with the new society. It felt a lot older. That is formula for death. So we redesigned it to make it feel a lot younger. We then started the hard stuff of repositioning the newsroom, making sure that it was woman-friendly and friendly to coloured people and African people. By friendly, I mean that people could pick up a paper and know that if something happened in their suburb it would be in the paper. That has happened, and the paper is growing very encouragingly on the Cape Flats and wider. But you don't want to lose your base readers. For example, my mother doesn't like my newspaper, because she was totally used to another thing and another country. The Argus relaunch has worked nicely. We've kept in the vast bulk of its traditional white readers.
CE: There has been quite an uproar about the IBA registering so many new radio stations. Do you think community broadcast journalism is the way forward?
SJ: Community stations are great. It’s a source of regret to me that where we are politically in the country means that we are unlike other countries, where there are tremendous synergies between newspapers and radio. Independent has tried to bid for some radio stations and we really have been blocked because there is still a sensitivity – and I think it’s very naïve – about cross ownership. Cross ownership is the way you make radio stations work. If we owned a great radio station here in the Western Cape, we could really make it work because we could synergise print and radio newsrooms.
CE: What is the group's approach to affirmative action?
SJ: It’s an absolutely huge issue. If we publish a newspaper in a province like KwaZulu-Natal and 86% of people in that province are of Zulu background and on the staff of that newspaper the percentage of people from Zulu extraction is zero, something is wrong. I’m very wary of people who are obsessed by quotas. We will never appoint someone who is not good enough for the job because you just do tremendous damage. We are fast-tracking a hell of a lot of black people. We’ve spent a lot of money to send people to the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. If you look at the SABC – for all the criticism of Zwelakhe Sisulu – it’s done. White males are being appointed at the SABC on merit, because it’s not an issue any more.
We’re getting there. Most of newsrooms now, on merit, are majority female. We need to start looking at commercial sections – distribution, advertising, printing, accounting – where it’s still very pale and male.
CE: Do you think that the Internet as a news medium poses a threat to print journalism?
SJ: Anyone who is complacent and blasé about the Internet in journalism is just plain stupid. We have an Internet department that follows the trends. Nobody has quite worked out in newspapers what the Internet means for them. I think there are going to be a lot of specialised services on the Internet. I don’t think that the future of newspapers on the Internet is about putting newspapers on the Internet. I think it’s a whole lot of interactive things.
CE: How do you see the media in the 21st century?
SJ: Interactive. Maybe custom made newspapers. People have been predicting the death of newspapers for a very long time. Here we are. We just have to keep up with the trends.
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