IT TAKES a particularly bitter sort of print journalist to celebrate and sneer over the demise of a newspaper, even a rival one. Most of the print hacks I know would at least have doffed their caps to The Weekender’s cortege as it passed by.

But not, it seems, one Brendan Seery, who I believe is the ‘op-ed’ editor on The Star and one of the Nabobs on the Saturday Star. He has penned and circulated one of the nastiest, twisted and obviously deeply revealing (of himself) attacks on a dead body (The Weekender) and a live one (yours truly) that I have ever read.

I’ll publish it it here, for you to read. For the record, at no time that I can remember during the planning, launch, production or closure of The Weekender did I ever mention the Saturday Star. I have never, ever, called its readers names. And while Seery disputes my claim that, for The Weekender, there was a gap in the market and a market in the gap, the latest Amps (All Media Product Survey) gave The Weekender 71 000 readers every weekend. Seery may not call that a market. Others would, or at least the start of one. For the record, again, many of his ‘facts’ about The Weekender are inaccurate.

Here, in all its glory, is Brendan Seery’s gloat:

“You’ve got smile a bit at all the crocodile tears being shed about the demise of The Weekender newspaper, one of this publication’s minor competitors on a Saturday.

There have been a number of comments – most from journalists and academics, it must be said – mourning the death of the newspaper. They mourn the closure of any newspaper because, supposedly, it’s the silencing of another voice in our “national debate” and the alternatives (including, one supposes, this newspaper) are too ghastly to contemplate.

The four-year experiment to produce a “quality” newspaper – presumably for “quality” readers – came to a simpering halt because the board of Avusa hot tired of seeing The Weekender bleeding millions of Rands.

It wasn’t bringing in much money in the way of advertising (and the advertising it was selling was so heavily discounted it was virtually being given away) and selling way under 10 000 copies an editio (and 6000 of those were effectively not buying it because they got it as an add-on to their subscription to parent publication Business Day)

It has been intimated by some of those involved – including Peter Bruce, editor of Business Day – that the paper’s closure was brought about by the poor local and international economic climate. Yet, the reality is that The Weekender, even in the good times of two or three years ago, never sold much advertising nor many copies. Its top circulation figure is said to have been around 12 000 – at a time when the Saturday Star was selling ten times that.

At the risk of being gunned down by other journalists, and at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I’d like to look at The Weekender and the weekend newspaper market.

Launched as the “intelligent person’s” read, The Weekender made much of the fact that it would offer a better quality read than was allegedly being offered by this newspaper. It was going for the cliched “top end of the market”– the place of papers like the Mail and Guardian (selling just over 50 000) and our sister newspaper, The Sunday Independent (selling just under 40 000).

Playing in that little market niche is somewhat akin to playing leapfrog in a minefield – as the littered corpses of previous failed attempts show – The Sunday Chronicle, back in the 1970s, Sports Day in the 1990s, and ThisDay in the first years of this century.

Peter Bruce is convinced that not only is there a “gap in the market”, but there is a “market in the gap”. His argument, repeated by other journalists, is that there is some huge pool of intelligent readers who are not served by the current offerings.

Oh really?

Spending a bit of time with the figures in the All Media and Products Survey produced by the SA Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) might have enlightened these experts. As they obviously have not gone too closely into AMPs, let me explode some of the common myths about readership – and specifically readership of weekend newspaper products.

l The Saturday Star has more readers with matric and post-matric education than the Mail and Guardian

l The Saturday Star’s average reader has a higher income than the average reader of the Mail and Guardian

l There are more Saturday Star readers in SAARF’s LSM (Living Standards Measure) 8-10 groups, the highest indicators of personal prosperity, than readers of the Mail and Guardian.

But, according to Peter Bruce and many other journalists, this newspaper’s readers are unintelligent and/or lower class. Go figure…

And, if the readers of this paper are unintelligent, then our advertisers must be total morons for coming back, week after week, to place ads on our pages. Could that possibly be because print ads – and in papers like The Star and Saturday Star (target as our criticis claim, at less than clever people) – actually work and actually help move products off shelves?

A true story: Some years ago, a hospitality group, which runs a number of five-star game lodge properties around the country, suddenly realised that they had a glut of bed nights. They were unable to get space in Saturday Star Travel, because its ad deadline had already passed.

However, because of a last-minute cancellation of a front-page ad in the main section of the paper, they were able to place their special offer ad. Even at the discounted rates, they were still asking something over R2 000 per person per night (and this was probably about six eight years ago).

The Saturday Star was the only place they ran this specific ad. Their entire inventory was sold by Tuesday. A similar price offer for another property, placed in another weekend newspaper, attracted just six phone calls and only two bookings. We have been told by travel agents that when they want to sell high-end products, like round-the-world cruise, their publication of choice is Saturday Star Travel. Must be a market for them in that niche..

Every week, more than 100 000 people take out their own money to buy this newspaper. That’s some market, Mr Bruce – at least compared to the one-tenth of that you managed to garner.

And every week, advertisers buy space. Both groups must be getting something which satisfies them. Or at least which satisifies them a lot more than the offering provided by The Weekender.

Having said that, the weekend market in this country is tough.
In the late 1990s, we were told by experts that Saturday papers were growing in circulation all around the world. That was obviously before the internet got up a head of steam. However, that was in countries on the northern hemisphere, where weather is often bad and people stay indoors on the weekends.

In this country, the Saturday Star’s biggest competitor – the biggest competitor for any newspaper publishing on a Saturday – is the day itself. People head off to the shopping malls; to meet, to eat and to shop. They play or watch sport. They go away, they chill out beside the pool. So selling papers on a Saturday is not easy.

And, I believe, the Saturday Star outsells papers like The Weekender because it has a wider range of stories, it breaks more news more consistently – and has regular, well-written favourites like the Travel supplement (one of the best read in the country and whose editor, Carol Lazar, is probably the best travel journalist this country has produced), the gardening and eating out columns and even the perennial, “non-intellectual” favourites like the cartoons and Your Stars.

We are often accused of being a “wrap around” for our comprehensive Property section – the biggest in the country. If that is the case, then why did this paper not collapse completely when the property market went into decline? And why did no less a strong player than the Sunday Times fail dismally when it tried to take this very important business away from us a few years ago?

I am tired of being told this is a trashy paper for dim people. I am tired of the people who mourn the death of papers like the Weekender. (and you as a reader should be too, because those comments are an insult to your intelligence)

Here’s the truth. Mourning the Weekender is like mourning a baby unborn because of a condom. The Weekender should never have been started at all. There never was, nor will there ever be, a newspaper market for a product whose sole purpose is to gratify the egos of journalists and people who look down their noses at those who are are supposedly less clever than they are.

It will be interesting to see if there is any reaction to this piece: all of those praising The Weekender say they won’t read anything else, so they won’t see this, will they?”

Seery clearly suffers from (I’m not sure if ‘suffer’ is the right word) what psychologists call ‘projection’. And he ‘transfers’. They’re not necessarily illnesses but they are chronic, meaning that he probably does both without being aware of it. Does Brendan complain a lot? Is everything someone else’s fault? His colleagues will know.

Projection is when you project your own fear about yourself onto something else. Seeing as The Weekender never said anything, EVER, about the Saturday Star, Seery’s view of of how some people see it from outside can only come from within himself. it must be tough to work for a news paper you secretly hate.

Transference is usually when you transfer your anger about one thing to something else. It’s like taking it out on your kids because your parents were horrible to you. I suspect the real reason for Seery’s diatribe is the Sunday Independent, another brave attempt by a publisher to bring quality to the weekends.

Like The Weekender, the Sunday Independent makes no profit and discounts the advertising it does get madly. But I applaud Tony O’Reilly, despite all his troubles, for sticking with it. He’s a publisher.

The only trouble is that the Sunday Independent drains money and resources away from, guess what? Yes, you got it — the Staurday Star! Now that we know what sweet people put the Saturday Star together, long may that continue.

When I was sent a copy of what he had written at about 4.30 on Wednesday afternoon, I called Seery to check that he had, indeed, written thins thing. By 12.30 this afternoon he had not returned my call. I can’t see the point of waiting any longer.

Cheers

Popularity: 10% [?]