The first sign that all was not well at The Weekender came earlier this year when the newspaper failed to appear for several weeks over the Christmas and New Year holiday. The reason given at the time was that there was too little advertising revenue to support a print run and so management (sic), in their wisdom, decided to save some money and not produce the paper.

That may be commendable husbandry but it was not a great marketing decision. A newspaper is a brand and it has subscribers. If the newspaper fails to appear for several weeks the subscribers get annoyed and the brand suffers. Readers like to be treated as customers but by not producing The Weekender the publisher, BDFM, treated them with disdain. They were happy to take their money but didn’t see why they should produce a newspaper if it didn’t suit them. I should emphatically point out that this is a management decision and not an editorial decision. Journalists always want to produce newsprint and I know that the staff at The Weekender were as horrified as were the readers at the decision not to produce the paper.

The second sign was the rumour that spread like wildfire a few months ago about freelance rates. The story was that freelancers on the paper had been phoned and asked to accept a drop in word rate from R3 to R1.75 a word, take it or leave it. To put this in perspective, I was writing 25 years ago for financial magazines at a word rate of R2. Most freelancers don’t have alternate sources of income so they have no choice but to agree. It must have been a joyful experience for them to learn that the CEO of the parent company AVUSA, was collecting R25 million in addition to a massive salary and bonus for the year.

The final edition of The Weekender appeared last Saturday (7th November) and I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the paper will be sorely missed. The decision to axe it came at a meeting on November 6th and no phase out period was allowed, no opportunity to find a buyer was considered and no niceties were observed. It’s the way they do things at 4 Biermann Avenue.

Some of the problems which hobbled the paper were a poor distribution arrangement and low advertising. Because The Weekender could only be printed in Johannesburg, it was a logistical problem to get it onto the newsstands in Durban and Cape Town early on Saturday morning. It was also expensive because papers had to be transported from Gauteng. The advertising problems were the same problems that any start up news paper experiences. Advertisers want to know who reads you and how many people see the paper before they spend money. Obviously a brand new paper has no track record and has to build up a loyal readership over time.

Peter Bruce believed The Weekender filled a niche in the market and he was spot on. The niche would have been predominantly white I suspect and on the wealthy side. An absolute sure fire winner when it comes to advertising you would have thought. When BMW spend R250000 to wrap an advert around a section of a newspaper they are doing so because they believe the sort of people reading that paper are the sort of people who go into BMW showrooms and buy their cars. There’s nothing terribly clever about that. Why do you think there are very few ads for Bentleys in The Sowetan?

So back in 2006 The Weekender had a large potential market for an intelligent, well written newspaper seeking to entertain and inform the upper end of the market. Even if the paper only went to 40000 people it wouldn’t matter providing those people were the right people. But something went horribly wrong.

Whether it was a management decision or an editorial decision I don’t know but there was clearly pressure to get the demographics right and get some black writers onto the pages. A newspaper like this should have appointed an opinionated, larger than life editor (I would have been an ideal candidate) who would have appeared on every TV and radio show possible and punted the new paper to potential advertisers. Instead they appointed a very quiet person with the correct struggle credentials. A thoroughly decent person by all accounts but not the person to raise the profile of a new newspaper. I doubt whether many people can even name the editor of The Weekender.

The problem with many black columnists is that they can’t write. Sure, they can string sentences together in such a way that they would pass an English language O level but, sadly, they are not very interesting writers. Many were academics and there is a great difference in writing a dry academic paper and knocking off a newspaper column that people actually want to read.

The cash strapped intellectual Xolela Mangcu was a case in point. Each week he would bore readers with how clever he was and how whiteys had better watch out because the day is coming when the darkies will run out of patience. This is not exactly what an affluent white wants to read in his weekend newspaper and the relief was palpable when Mangcu “resigned”, having failed to substantiate a defamatory claim he had made in his column about one of his betters.

So the mix was wrong because BDFM kowtowed to political correctness rather than taking note of what the customer wanted. That undoubtedly affected advertising revenue.
However, the real reason The Weekender was put in front of the firing squad last Friday was that it was seen as a threat to the AVUSA cash cow, The Sunday Times.

I’ve lost count of how many people have told me how bad The Sunday Times is and how they’ve cancelled their subscriptions but it’s still a cash cow. The problem is that The Weekender was competing with the Sunday Times for the same slice of the advertising pie when it first appeared in 2006. Today I am not so sure because Mondli Makhanya has taken the paper so far downmarket and it now has limited appeal to the intelligent readers. That made it all the more important to get rid of The Weekender because, with intelligent management support, it could so easily have become the paper of choice for the affluent chattering classes. That would have severely dented Sunday Times revenue and threatened the enormous bonuses the boys at the ST like to give themselves.

So forget what you read in the polite press release and trust me on this one. The Weekender had to go because it was a threat to the Luthuli House Herald (aka the ST) and didn’t fit in with the corporate code of mediocrity that dictates what goes on at AVUSA house. R.I.P. The Weekender….your passing is not a good sign of things to come.