The big question for the Argus's owners, Independent Newspapers, is how this important change will affect its other Cape Town-based newspapers, the Cape Times and the Daily Voice.
Chris Whitfield, editor-in-chief of the Cape Times, Cape Argus, Weekend Argus and Daily Voice, tells Bizcommunity.com about this delicate balancing act.
Is the Cape Argus move a repositioning or is the main thing to leave behind the dying afternoon-newspaper market and get into the morning market?
Chris Whitfield: Well, it's not a secret that the sales of the Argus have been dipping (down to 44 159 in the last quarter of 2011 from 47 797 in the comparable period of 2010 and 58 052 sales in the last quarter of 2009) in spite of a lot of interventions and in spite of, I think, some very, very good work.
Gasant [Abarder] (@GasantAbarder), for example, has been a very good editor for the newspaper and he understands the community very well. But the sales aren't picking up. And we're now sitting with a 155-year-old newspaper and the media landscape around the world is dotted with the tombstones of afternoon newspapers. So we saw the pattern coming at us and we thought: "OK, we don't want to shut down the paper." The paper's doing fine and making a profit but the long-term prognosis [is] worrying.
One of the big issues we're wrestling with is what happens to the Cape Times [a broadsheet that goes out in the morning]. But our view on this is that if the Argus had been owned by a rival company, it would have been a morning title 10 years ago.
I think Cape Town is big enough to have two English papers in the morning. It's a big city now - it's grown to about 3.8 million people.
Whitfield: There're three [papers] if you count the Daily Voice [a morning tabloid started in 2005]. So is it a repositioning of the Argus? The answer is: "No, the Argus has always been pitched at the mid-market." You know, the classic reader triangle: the Cape Times goes to the top, the Argus to the middle and the Voice to the bottom.
But the other thing that is almost inevitable with the new format - and it's just part of the process as we've being doing lots and lots of dummy pages - is that you do get a slightly different feel. It is definitely brighter and probably more people-orientated [in terms of stories]. So it's more of a reinvigorating rather than a repositioning, I suppose.
Did you guys do research? Are you worried that the change to compact format will be rejected by the readers because some people view tabloids as beneath them
Whitfield: Ja, we're calling it a 'compact' for very specific reasons - that's our code for it. We've done a lot of research and I went to quite a few of the session, where you sit behind the mirror window.
We did research on people who were current readers of different age groups, lapsed readers, etc. They'd sit down and tell you what they thought of the paper [in its broadsheet format] and then you'd tell them that we were going to bring it down to compact format and a lot of them would be very uncomfortable and nervous and ask if it was going to be a tabloid. And then we'd show them the dummy and they absolutely unilaterally loved it.
If you look [at the new format], it doesn't look like a tabloid. It looks like a mid-market, bright newspaper.
This can be tricky. When the Daily Dispatch [in East London] changed its Saturday edition to tabloid format, the market hated it. Sales took a dive and it took a long time to get circulation back up again.
Whitfield: You know, you always do these things with a degree of taking a gamble. But the kind of reaction we're getting from advertisers - who are fighting each other to get into it - and people generally is very, very positive.
We found at the Dispatch that advertisers mistrusted the new product because the ad space shrunk [when the Saturday broadsheet went tabloid] and, because the advertisers weren't used to tabloids, they felt that they were getting a lesser deal. How are you managing that?
Whitfield: We've had to do a lot of work on that and you can't say to a person that a full-page in the compact size is the same as a full-page in a broadsheet. So we've tried to persuade people to take out double-page spreads. It hasn't been an easy sell, so to speak, but the latest indications that I'm getting from the advertising department is that people are very, very positive and we're getting a lot of ads.
I am right in understanding that the Argus is broadly aimed at the coloured market?
Whitfield: Around about 55% of the Argus readers are coloured readers and then about 30-odd percent is white, so it's very much a coloured market and we think that it can grow in that market.
I reckon the Daily Voice must have cannibalised the Argus's readers at the bottom end of the market - and now they're both going out in the morning but I suppose they're not competing head-to-head.
Whitfield: We're going to have to watch it very carefully but the Argus will be both morning and afternoon. It's still got - initially anyway - the same print order in the afternoon and a smaller print run in the morning. We're going into the market fairly cautiously to get a sense of where it works and where it doesn't work - obviously with an eye on where the Cape Times and the Daily Voice sells. We've got to be quite careful that we don't cannibalise the other products. It's a really delicate balancing act. We're going to have to watch it very closely as it evolves.
OK, so that's the reason that Argus subscribers will continue to get their papers delivered in the afternoon - and not now in the morning. [The Argus has 16 261 individual subscribers and 1 331 business subscribers, according to the ABC circulation figures for the last quarter of 2011.]
Whitfield: Ja, the problem that we're dealing with is that the Argus still sells over 40 000 in the afternoon slot. Now if we went straight into the morning, there're a lot of people who are going to say: "Well, I'll go for the Cape Times now" or "I'll go for the Argus ahead of the Cape Times." So we want to get a sense of what the Argus is going to do in the morning.
It would be easier if you guys didn't own all these papers because then you could just go completely aggressive with the Argus in the morning - and not worry about the Cape Times and the Daily Voice.
Whitfield: Well, we have three papers and we have to deal with it.
The Cape Times is holding largely steady in terms of circulation [at 42 849 in the last quarter of 2011, compared with 42 710 the year before and 44 480 in the last quarter of 2009] - which is significant, considering the general circulation decline of newspapers.
Whitfield: Ja, the Cape Times is doing absolutely fine. As I said, we're dealing with two newspapers here - one with a 155-year-old history and one with 130-odd years - and we desperately want them both to thrive.
Is there a way to grow the Cape Times circulation?
Whitfield: The Cape Times, yes. We've got various initiatives we're going to get going on the Cape Times very soon.
I know everyone across the board is worried about circulation decline and, within 5-10 years, there will be closures but then this will also be an opportunity if you're holding steady - because you can move in and grab those readers of the titles that are shut down.
Whitfield: Ja, exactly. There will be opportunities except that we own the whole market down here [in the Western Cape]. I could bore you to death with my theories about why newspapers have got into trouble. But I really think that, if newspapers return to their campaigning roots, there's a market out there for them.
Ja, especially for the regional papers because it connects the papers very strongly to their communities. So will we see the Cape papers doing more of that?
Whitfield: Well, the Cape Times is an issue-driven newspaper and that's worked for it. It could probably do more and we're going to have to sit down and really spend some time on it once the Argus project has got going.
But the Argus is going to concentrate very, very strongly on the local community. You're familiar with the mid-market compact British newspapers like the Daily Mail? We've got guys here from the Mail and The Belfast Telegraph [owned by the Argus's ultimate parent company, the Irish-based Independent News & Media and which has also moved from broadsheet to compact and introduced morning editions] and the Dublin Sunday World [also owned by Independent News & Media] all working head-down on it and, ja, I think it's going to be a very good product.
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