Top title had to ‘roll with the punches’ to stay competitive
PICTURE: Media24
International News Media Association
Daily Sun, a Media24 news outlet in South Africa, was launched as a print publication in 2002. By 2007, it was the biggest title in the country.
During the INMA Africa Newsroom Transformation Summit, Amos Mananyetso, editor at the publication, shared how the brand was challenged by and then overcame digital disruption.
Circulation declined rapidly around 2012, Mananyetso said. When the paper implemented its digital-first strategy in 2020, it did not quite take off. Two years later came a turning point and now, as of last year, the news outlet is a digital-only publication.
‘We are a quarter into [the journey], so we are considering ourselves actually as a start-up if you look at where we come from and where we’re trying to go’
Mananyetso shared lessons from the first failed attempt to implement a digital-first strategy that helped the company succeed with its now-successful strategy.
The first lesson, Mananyetso said, is that leadership did not sell the vision to the staff – they tried to force it upon them. The leadership team made many assumptions, and what seemed obvious to them was not so obvious to the rest of the staff.
The company had to reverse the process and ensure they were communicating the importance in moving away from analog to digital, Mananyetso said, ‘because our sustainability is based on how we then roll with the punches or move with the times’.
Tied to that lesson, leadership also learned the importance of knowing internal stakeholders. Everyone was not on the same wavelength about the transition to digital.
Understanding their audience became a critical lesson that helped the Daily Sun retain its readers amid its digital transformation – and even gain some new ones. It was known as the paper for low-income communities, Mananyetso said, and these communities have been some of the slowest to adapt to the new digital age as they did not have easy access to the Internet, smartphones or computers.
But, Mananyetso said, readers’ children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews were accustomed to seeing their relatives reading the newspaper at home. And they do have the right access to connect with the brand online
‘So what that means is when the age, the demographic of our audience dropped, it gave us an even better chance of survival into the future, because it means then that we’ll have many more readers in the next years to come who will grow with us.’
The final lesson is focused on communication with both internal and external stakeholders. Mananyetso told how the brand communicated about the migration to digital, especially with its readers, and how that had to be carefully planned. Still, no amount of communication can keep everyone in the loop.
‘The reality is there are still some people out there, especially our old readers, who think that the Daily Sun has died and was buried in 2024.’
To stay competitive in the new age of digital journalism, Mananyetso said the publication has had to invest in new tools and skills. When he started out as a journalist, all he needed was a backpack, a pen, and sometimes a photojournalist to join him. ‘Now, it’s different.’
The Daily Sun is running training workshops to make sure the entire team is skilled accordingly. Teaching how to frame properly when taking videos, how to publish on social to maximum effect, and things of that nature has been critical.
‘Newsroom training is very important and it must be ongoing as we have also started realising that, from time to time, trends change, things change,’ Mananyetso explained. ‘The equipment itself keeps changing and getting better. So you need to make sure that your team is always up to date with all those changes.’
Digital publishing comes with advantages that benefit both the readers and the journalists. Readers have access to video, voice, and graphics rather than just text and pictures. And journalists can connect more directly with those readers.
With more than 620 000 members in its WhatsApp group, the Daily Sun team can get fast feedback from readers on the stories they publish – of even the ones they may have missed
Finally, Mananyetso said, it is critical to keep teams adaptable. Journalism has not faced challenges for a long time, and people, by nature, can be slow to adapt to change. Change management has to be continuous.
To illustrate why it’s important for journalists to move with the times, Mananyetso’s favourite method is to use music as an example. Music used to be on vinyl, then audio tapes, then CDs, and so on. People never said ‘we’re going to stop listening to music or buying it because the format changed’.
‘The same with journalism. My belief is that we need to make sure that we continue to produce high quality journalism that we’ve always been producing. The only difference obviously going into the future is how we then publish and distribute it.
‘People are not going to start saying: “We don’t want quality journalism anymore”.’
- This article was first published here
