Reflections on editing a critical newspaper
This is my last column as editor of Business Day, and I thought it might be enlightening to reflect a little on what it’s been like to be the editor of a newspaper in the era of former president Jacob Zuma and current US president, Donald Trump, to name just two icons of our time.
I have absolutely loved every moment of being editor of this paper and I stand down with a sense of a job respectably, albeit incompletely, done in difficult circumstances. But at the same time, I can’t help noticing that my friends have diminished; my enemies have increased; I open my e-mail with trepidation; I barely scan Twitter because I know someone will be shouting at me and I meet people often with a cautious demeanour.
I feel somewhat akin to a battle-scarred soldier in the trenches of the First World War — blistered, bruised, twitching at every loud bang, but enormously happy to have survived and somewhat proud of having fought well even though victory seems elusive.
The biggest problem with being an editor is that the number of enemies you make increases exponentially. This is particularly so nowadays because newspapers are in a state of decline, but more so because while people like the idea of newspapers being critical in general, they dislike it rather intensely when that critique is applied to them.
This has a particular application in SA, because I and my predecessors, Songezo Zibi and Peter Bruce, share one crucial feature: we have been determined to ensure we maintain our ethic of being a critical publication and that this should be at the core of our work. Business Day is the last national daily newspaper to treasure that ideal, although some radio and television stations and digital platforms are right up there with us. Many of our competitors just ran off the field, treating the calamitous Zuma period with fealty, getting suckered by the frequent falsities they peddled and joining the party only when a change was imminent.
In Business Day’s case, that posed real problems for our news selection and orientation.
Our management at Tiso Blackstar were and are determined to ensure the newspaper keeps its focus firmly on business, a desire I share. But readers increasingly wanted us to become a kind of generalist newspaper. The broader political events were so spellbinding that we were often dragged into a national political discussion, to the detriment of following the business story more acutely. I sincerely hope we haven’t strayed too far; I don’t think we have, but it has been complicated.
The other complicating factor is that South African newspapers have a proprietorship problem. They are owned by an internet mogul, a political actor, a printing company and a private equity company. Of the four, I would take ours in a heartbeat, and I credit Tiso Blackstar management with doing two great things for Business Day — facing the company forwards into a digital era and providing editors with enormous support during the #GuptaLeaks e-mails saga.
Newspapers lack real publishers who love journalism for the truth it brings, rather than for the money it earns (or doesn’t) or the influence it generates or the platform it provides to drift off into new adventures in the digital era. Newspapers are not things; they are ideas. And they are fragile ones at that. They are porcelain vases in an open sea. They should be treated with awe, not with a callous pruning knife.
While reporting in the Zuma era was blistering in pace, it’s also been a godsend to SA because the pent-up frustration with the declining quality of the products (outside Business Day of course!) was mitigated by the obvious need for a responsible investigative press.
The latest comments by Moody’s on the importance of the press are not only music to my ears but also an indication of the times we are in. Never before has the conscious caution of edited, considered, balanced copy been so valuable.
Yet, never has providing it been so difficult. Business Day’s staff is now about half what it was a decade ago, about in line with our circulation. Yet, we publish about 200 stories a day, about double what we did a decade ago, and about a third of those go on to the web. We are now firmly digital facing. Over the past five years, Business Day’s hit rate (“unique users”, or the number of individuals who read at least one story on a single day) doubled, redoubled, and then redoubled again. Our editorial output has never touched more people on any one day as it does now.
Yet time to press, the time difference between when a story breaks and when it is published, is now absurd. I’ve spent an awful lot of time as an editor trying to stop things from being published rather than getting them published. But because we are now in a digital timeframe, the temptation to publish is huge because if you don’t, somebody else will.
And yet, it has all been exhilarating and enormous fun. Journalists tend to be rare oddities: irascible, complaining and hypercritical. Managing them is ridiculous. Yet their saving grace is that they are smart, involved, intrigued and essentially good-hearted, at least the ones I have worked with, and I love them all deeply.
Thanks to you too, as readers, for bearing with me and this column. I think you will find my most excellent successor, Lukanyo Mnyanda, a much-improved replacement.
And thanks once again to my fabulous deputy, the inimitable Carol Paton.
It has been an honour.