Wednesday 26 August 2020

Paul Peters got me, and my role in selling The Star

 

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.