THE FM, SIMPLER, BETTER, FASTER
SA’s oldest business magazine, now 63 years old, is reverting to the glossy, more compact design that worked for decades
You’ll have noticed that the magazine you’re holding in your hands today looks somewhat different: more compact and glossy than in the past few months. It’s part of a strategic shift, first, to re-emphasise our mission to produce the definitive weekly news magazine that gives you all you need to know and second, to ensure a reliable paper supply that gives us more flexibility in our printing.
We’d been experimenting with our paper for a few months and readers were pretty divided: one described it as “luxurious like a Woolworths catalogue”, while another said it smelt like a leaking petrol pump. In the end, it was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that forced our hand.
The story is that a decade ago, we redesigned the FM as an oversized publication. It was a bit of a nightmare, because it didn’t fit easily on shelves and there weren’t many printers who kept that size paper. It came to a head after Covid, when a number of magazines shut down notably Finweek which prompted our printers to shut down their press. This wasn’t just a local phenomenon. Last November, The Economist reported how the “cost of paper that feeds into presses around the world is rising to record highs, pushing up expenses for newspapers from Mumbai to Sydney”.
Globally, printers hiked their prices to offset falling demand, while paper mills either shut down part of their capacity, or began producing packaging for online merchants.
Putin’s war dramatically upped the ante.
In recent weeks, papers including The Times of India and Sydney Morning Herald have detailed how shipping snarl-ups, soaring energy costs in paper mills, and a reliance on Russian paper have “driven prices to unsustainably high levels”.
In SA, it’s not quite so grim. But these ructions did allow us to switch to the more substantial, glossier paper that characterised the magazine for decades, particularly during the exemplary leadership of Barney Mthombothi, Caroline Southey and Peter Bruce.
So why, you ask, bother printing at all? Many readers download e-editions in exactly the same format as our print edition, so why not go entirely digital?
Well, for a start, there are thousands of readers who still prefer to get the physical FM every week. Again, this isn’t just because South Africans are behind the curve.
As Peter Vandermeersch, publisher of the Mediahuis Ireland (formerly the Independent), put it: “People say [print media] is a sunset market, but in Belgium and the Netherlands, we’re doing better than ever in history — and the history there goes back
150 years.”
A hybrid joint print-and-digital FM also works financially. Print publications command an advertising premium, which allows news organisations to hire journalists, and give them enough latitude to get to the bottom of a story.
Last week, a media executive casually told one of our FM editors that “print is dead”. It’s an archaic and ignorant view, because nobody has just a “print” newsroom any more — all media houses publish their work online, and print just gives them another platform to showcase their work.
It’s an artificial distinction anyway. As Vandermeersch puts it: “I’m not so much interested in print or digital — I’m interested in journalism.”
That’s the crux of the matter. Most journalists couldn’t care about the platform — they just want as many people to read their stories as possible, and for those stories to matter.
As it is, SA has a media industry that punches far above its weight. Few countries can claim, as we can, that the likes of amaBhungane and Daily Maverick, as well as commercial operations like News24 and titles in the Arena stable such as Business Day and the FM, have built sandbags to protect our democracy.
It’s not about the binary of print or digital — it’s that public sentiment is shifting “back towards trusted brands” on whatever platform, as the Reuters Institute reports.
In March 2021, my colleague Ryk van Niekerk, editor of Moneyweb, threw down the gauntlet to the corporate sector.
He said every CEO he’d spoken to agreed that a strong media was vital to “protect our constitutional democracy ”— but he challenged them to ensure their marketing departments act on this as “the most effective way to protect our economy”.
Which isn’t to say news organisations can be complacent. As the 2019 Nielsen digital news report argued, much online news is hardly worth our time, let alone our cash. So the imperative must be to produce “better and more distinct journalism”, focusing on “what readers actually value”.
We’re acutely aware of the need to ensure we’re more directly relevant in readers’ lives — which is why the FM will add new elements to ensure we do just this in the next few weeks.
This includes a new personal finance section that aims to help readers understand their money — from deciphering the world of cryptocurrencies, picking the best ETFs, to assessing whether NFTs are worth your time.
This, we believe, will provide the sort of usable insights that will strengthen our country’s economic muscle, in much the same way as the intelligence provided by our writers (like Sisonke Msimang’s brilliant essay this week) make us a smarter, better-equipped country.