I was saddened to hear
of the passing of Paul Peters this week. Paul was the circulation manager of
The Star throughout the period that I worked there and there was never any
doubt that he was firmly in my corner when it came to fighting for the significance
of the role that I was playing at the newspaper.
The tensions that exist
between the editorial and business functions of newspapers are well-known and
universal. The editors and reporters want to serve up the best stories. The
businesspeople have to make money and revenue comes from two sources –
circulation and advertising. The conventional story – books have been written
and movies made about it – is that neither side cares very much for the other
and doesn’t really see the point to what they do.
The reality is that
both are important. Circulation - the number of copies sold – determines advertising
rates which means how much money you can charge, and the number of newspapers
sold is determined by the editorial content. So, while newspapers are
businesses first and foremost and nothing else matters if they don’t make
money, they can’t make any if no-one stops at the robot to buy their daily
paper each day, so editorial content is crucial.
It’s one of those unresolvable
conflicts and the circulation manager, Paul Peters in our case, finds himself right
in the middle of it.
I worked at The Star
for 22 years but never in hard news. I’ve seen comments this week from news people
who knew Paul recalling that there were robust discussions around which kinds
of stories were the ones that sold newspapers and I’m pretty sure that they often
didn’t see eye to eye on that.
Paul Peters knew what was
needed to get people to buy the newspaper. His knowledge and intuition was
legendary and has been acknowledged by those who have marked his passing. He
could guess the number of sales on a big news day, and on a quiet day, when it
was raining, and during a cold snap. And he was always pretty much spot on.
For me personally, the
important thing was that he realised that the products I was responsible for – the
Workplace supplement and school sport – were important factors in the circulation
numbers on the days that they appeared in the paper.
Workplace was a
recruitment advertising supplement and Wednesdays, when it was published, were
the biggest sales days for the daily Star throughout my time there. That even
continued, on a smaller scale, after 2008 when a combination of the global financial
slump and the takeover of classified advertising by the internet changed
everything. The decision by Independent Newspapers management at the time to
replace our advertising sales force with a call centre didn’t help either.
The circulation bump
on Wednesdays was due to the unemployment situation in Joburg. Workplace
carried pages and pages of job ads and people bought the Star in their
thousands hoping to find a job. We never fooled ourselves that it was our
editorial that was selling the paper in those numbers. But Paul Peters knew,
and told me, that the quality of editorial in Workplace played an important part
in getting those recruitment advertisers to come to us. The recruitment
agencies became a news source for us, not of advertorial but in terms of expert
advice around the best ways of finding and keeping a job.
The point was that our
stories were about Joburg people and businesses and Paul knew local news sells
papers. Editor Peter Sullivan commissioned research into readership in the late
1990s (the only time it was done in all my years at The Star) and the focus
groups showed that the New Appointments page in Workplace – pictures and
captions of appointments and promotions – was the most read page in the entire
newspaper! Paul’s view was that the Workplace editorial (even without the
recruitment ads) gave Wednesday’s numbers a boost.
School sport was
different. It never sold advertising. The advertising sales department did make a few attempts to get sponsors and advertisers aboard, without any success. It
did have a readership which, though not huge, was fiercely loyal. You could
count on a niche readership to buy the paper every time school sport was in it, and
they wouldn’t buy it if it wasn’t.
Paul Peters knew better
than anyone that every single paper sold was important and he was never happy
when school sport was dropped, or severely cut back in size. Until my last few
years when Kevin Ritchie came up with the idea of an eight-page School Sport
supplement in the Saturday Star as a permanent feature, I was in a constant
battle with the sports department. They were always being squeezed for
space and believed national and international sport should take precedence,
which is perfectly understandable.
The fact is, though, that when school sport was dropped it affected circulation. I know that because
Paul Peters told me so. For example, it was decided during the 2010 World Cup
to drop school sport entirely to accommodate more World Cup stories. Paul told
me afterwards that there was no appreciable increase in circulation that could
be credited to the increased soccer coverage, and we lost the couple of
thousand regular school sport readers as well.
Paul was a fan of school sport. His son Tyrone, who I later became friends with, was an
acclaimed coach at Highlands North and later at Jeppe and Paul followed him
closely. So he wasn’t completely unbiased, but he told me once that a few columns
of results of school matches, and a photo with lots of names and faces was
worth more to him than a half page portrait of Cristiano Ronaldo. I believed him.
I’ll miss Paul Peters,
the newspaper world is poorer for his passing.
