Keeping up with the Times

The fast growth of the internet has meant stiff competition for one of history’s most trusted sources of information, the newspaper. Despite this, a new South African daily, The Times, has been described by its editor-in-chief, Mondli Makhanya, as a “mega success”. Susan Smit tries to establish if The Times has a formula that might be print’s saving grace.

In mid-2007 the 102 year-old South African newspaper the Sunday Times published the first edition of its new daily, The Times. The tabloid-size newspaper is aimed at a younger, faster paced generation and is a welcome addition to a print market that many have already declared dead.

The Times has embraced the internet by completely integrating its print and online operations, trying to give readers the best of both.

This approach is not surprising. The 2007 edition of Trends in Newsrooms, a report published by the World Editors Forum, discusses the integration of the newsroom as one of the most important trends in the media today.

In an email interview with SMF, the editor of The Times, Ray Hartley, said the idea for The Times began in 2006 when the Sunday Times started looking at ways to “power up” their web presence.

Publishing daily would mean turning their site, www.thetimes.co.za, into a 24/7 operation. While stories are published in the newspaper, readers are given the opportunity to “comment and engage with stories online”.

Hartley says the stories are also enhanced with online videos, slideshows and audio. Consequently Hartley prefers the term “audience” to “readers”.

Hartley describes the average reader (or audience member) of The Times as someone probably “employed in a high-pressure job or looking after kids”.

He says while the Sunday Times offers them their weekly dose of opinion, analysis and large features, The Times is aimed at giving the reader a quick morning news fix. The paper is then left for the parent and/or child that stay at home to read at a slower pace.

In 2005 Media24 tested the same target market in Johannesburg with Nova, a daily aimed at “professionals on the move”.

After four and a half months the daily closed, citing “unsatisfactory sales”. The CEO of Naspers, Koos Bekker, in an interview with SMF described Nova as a “total flop”. He said it was due to poor journa-lism, delivery problems and Gauteng’s over-saturated newspaper market that caused the paper to fail.

Hartley feels that Nova was “just another old-school newspaper launched in an era when people demand so much more from print”. According to Hartley Nova was not effectively integrated with the web and did not meet the demand for interactivity. Hartley adds that Nova also did not have the readership base that The Times had by going direct to the Sunday Times subscri-bers. Initially The Times was only delivered to subscribers of the Sunday Times, but is now also sold at selected outlets and street corners.

According to Hartley another reason The Times was launched was to grow the subscriber base of the Sunday Times. It currently has a circulation of 504 400 of which 136 000 are subscribers. Taking The Times directly to subscribers, at no additional cost, also removed the biggest obstacle faced by start-up dailies, namely building a readership from scratch.

While addressing a group of journalism students from Stellenbosch University at the Sunday Times offices, editor Mondli Makhanya said the biggest challenge for the newspaper has not been racial demographics (a consideration for any mainstream newspaper in South Africa), but catering for younger readers. “A newspaper cannot be left behind when society is changing,” Makhanya said.

Although Makhanya is still the editor-in-chief of both the Sunday Times and The Times, he insists that the new daily is autonomous. “The Times runs The Times,” he says.

In 2006 the World Editors Forum and Reuters commissioned a Newsroom Barometer. The Barometer is intended to “promote better knowledge of the evolution of the newspaper through the eyes of senior news executives”. The survey posed media related questions to 435 senior executives from newsrooms all over the world.

A total of 53% of the respondents claimed to already have an integrated newsroom. Of those respondents that indicated that they did not have one, 69% said they expect to have one within the next five years.

George Brock, president of the World Editors Forum, said in his analysis of the results published in Trends in Newsrooms 2007, that newspapers which innovate and adapt will survive because “their qualities are more important than the medium”.

At The Times, managers, including the editor, don’t have offices. According to Hartley the strategy was to create an open environment with “free communication where digital and print operations are totally integrated”.

The writers, videographers and photographers also sit together in “pods”, each one assigned to a different beat.

Hartley says that journalists are excited about working at The Times, because it is a paper “for the times”.
“Journalists will acquire vital skills that will position them for a future in which pure print skills will not be enough,” he says.

In the Newsroom Barometer, 83% of the respondents agreed that within five years journalists will be expected to know how to produce content for all platforms: print, video, audio and web. Furthermore, 36% of the respondents indicated that their number one newsroom investment would be to train journalists in new media.

According to Makhanya the Sunday Times’ website traffic has grown by 75% since The Times was launched. This seems to indicate that the “audience” is embracing the concept of the integrated newspaper and sees the website as a legitimate source of information in an ever competitive online market.

In his analysis of the Newsroom Barometer published in Trends in Newsrooms 2007. Jeff Jarvis, head of the interactive journalism programme at City University New York, says that the biggest threat to newspapers is not the internet or free sheets, but editors who have “resisted change and missed so many of the opportunities technology provides to expand journalism”.

The Times is only a little more than a year old and only time will tell if it will survive. However The Times has proven not to be your average print newspaper, choosing instead to reach a new generation of media consumers through the platforms that they prefer.

Jarvis describes the move best when he says, “print will not die, but print is not our future”.