The Rand Daily Mail: convenient scapegoat

Raymond Louw reflects on the 20th anniversary of the closure of the Mail by its management.

Summary - Just 20 years ago, the Anglo American Corporation closed the Rand Daily Mail, leaving behind a trail of sacked editors and loyal journalists and readers who even now express their sorrow at its departure.

The paper lingers on, however, at the Witwatersrand University’s Business School, where its demise has become the subject of a lecture on how not to run a business. The lecture deals with the tricky subject of how costs should be allocated in companies where common resources are shared between their various enterprises.

At South African Associated Newspapers (Saan), the Mail, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express were the main users of the company’s production, management, circulation and advertising departments. Costs were allocated to each paper on the amount of usage of these facilities by each paper and the business school lecture is about how important it is to ensure that those costs are correctly apportioned.

The allocations to the Mail were grossly miscalculated. When the paper closed on 30 April 1985, the company’s overdraft was R10 million; a month later with no Mail to absorb the wrongly calculated and over-estimated costs, the overdraft had soared to R40 million and the company was forced to sell its building and presses to try to remain solvent.

The closure caused huge damage elsewhere; it seared the country’s news gathering and distribution systems, from which the industry has still not recovered.

The Mail was the cornerstone of a shared news service which operated under the title of the South African Morning Newspaper Group. The Mail and its sister morning papers pooled their news services, enabling all the papers to have access to the work of all their reporters — between 250 and 300.

The Mail’s contribution was huge, partly due to it being situated in the country’s biggest city, where most of the news is generated. Now, suddenly, the coastal papers were left floundering.

Another victim was the national news agency, the South African Press Association (Sapa), which operates on a co-operative basis, taking news from its customer newspapers and distributing it to all papers elsewhere in the country.

The Afrikaans press had pounced on each issue of the Mail for story ideas. Foreign correspondents had looked to the Mail as a reliable source for their reports.

Claims that the Mail preached only to the “converted” fall far short of the reality. The paper’s “unconverted” readers included people in the business and other sectors of society who relied on a morning paper, but did not necessarily endorse the Mail’s editorial line.

The paper’s journalists were embattled on all sides, particularly in the desperate 80s.

The country was tense and edging ever more to the right to support “law and order” and it was no different in the Saan building. The non-editorial departments complained that the paper’s policies were an obstacle to promoting their business operations; and there was ill-concealed dislike of the editorial staff.

The decision to centralise separate advertising departments dedicated to each paper into a single operation resulted in the Sunday Times — an easy sell — growing fatter and the Mail and Sunday Express being starved; coupled with this was the decision by Saan to break from the industry-wide circulation company, Allied Publishing, losing millions on conducting its own circulation operation.

There was also the story of the new M-Net TV licence being given to the newspaper industry on condition that the Mail was closed, though this has never been confirmed.

Then the indifference of Anglo American, which did not want to be seen to be in control of the English press, as indeed it was, came into play. Anglo American could have intervened but nothing happened and the paper was closed.

The Mail’s exceptionally strong competitive influence has not been replaced, nor has the strong Morning Group news pool arrangement, and the result is a still-deteriorating standard of journalism, a reduction in the gathering and dissemination of news on a nationwide basis and the general impoverishment of the public’s right to know.

Just 20 years ago, the Anglo American Corporation closed the Rand Daily Mail, South Africa’s liberal daily newspaper that had consistently opposed apartheid since the Nationalists came to power in 1948, leaving behind a trail of sacked editors and loyal journalists who still reminisce fondly and readers who even now express their sorrow at its departure.

At South African Associated Newspapers (Saan), the Mail, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express were the main users of the company’s production, management, circulation and advertising departments. Costs were allocated to each paper on the amount of usage of these facilities by each paper and the business school lecture is all about how important it is to ensure that those costs are correctly apportioned.

The closure caused huge damage elsewhere; it severely reduced competition from daily journalism and seared the country’s news gathering and distribution systems, from which the industry has still not recovered.

The Mail was the cornerstone of a shared news service which operated under the title of the South African Morning Newspaper Group. The concept was simple but effective. The Mail and its sister morning papers, the Cape Times (Cape Town), Natal Mercury (Durban), Eastern Province Herald (Port Elizabeth) and Daily Dispatch (East London) pooled their news services, enabling all the papers to have access to the work of all their reporters — between 250 and 300.

The Mail’s contribution was huge, partly due to it being situated in the country’s biggest city, where most of the news is generated. At one stage, for every story originating at the Cape Times used by the Mail, the Times used 14 Mail stories and for the smaller papers the ratio was one to 22.

Now, suddenly, this huge news gatherer and distributor was gone and the coastal papers were left floundering with inadequate makeshift substitutes. Another victim was the national news agency, the South African Press Association (Sapa), which operates on a co-operative basis, taking news from its customer newspapers and distributing it to all papers elsewhere in the country. Sapa’s then editor Ed Linington desperately lamented that he had lost Sapa’s biggest contributor of news.

A wail arose from an unexpected quarter, the Afrikaans press. It had pounced on each issue of the Mail for story ideas, especially those where it could launch out against the opposition, and now this prolific source had gone. Yet another group of people were devastated, the foreign correspondents, who looked to the Mail as a reliable source for their reports on what was happening in South Africa.

Among its readers were people who entertained liberal ideas and were bolstered by the Mail in their opposition to apartheid and a large number of black people, many of whom still praise the paper for taking up their cause so vociferously. But there was also a considerable number of ardent Nationalists who read the Mail. They were among the Afrikaners who formed 21 per cent of the paper’s readership. As one confessed, “We don’t believe everything the government tells us; we want to know what is going on and we also want to know what the other side thinks”.

So, claims that the Mail preached only to the “converted” fall far short of the reality. Indeed, the paper’s stories had an enormous readership, through the Morning Group, Sapa, foreign correspondents and indirectly through the Afrikaans press. Then the paper’s “unconverted” readers included people in the business and other sectors of society who relied on a morning paper, but did not necessarily endorse the Mail’s editorial line.

Former The Star editor Harvey Tyson in his book, Editors Under Fire, writes that the death of the Mail could not have come at a worse time. He refers to “a sense of loneliness” after the closure: The Mail “ran ahead, cheering up the zealots, gingering up faltering liberals and irritating the government... the rest of us in the opposition press camps followed after, carrying the same message but in lower tones”.

He went on, “Not only did the death of the Rand Daily Mail that year make the middle-road even more difficult to occupy, it produced a sense of loss of support in the midst of battle”.

However, the paper was much more than a standard bearer against apartheid; despite the government’s hatred, it was a remarkable bridge builder. There is no doubt in the minds of many of its staff that the demise of apartheid and the arrival of a democratic black government with so little violence and bloodshed between whites and blacks was partly due to the fact that the firm anti-apartheid stance by the Mail and some of the country’s other English-language newspapers contributed in large measure to that peaceful transition.

The message, that apartheid was corrupt, vicious, untenable, maliciously discriminatory, had made an impact on whites and certainly helped to dampen whatever inclinations some may have had to indulge in armed conflict.

The paper was extremely fortunate in having attracted a remarkable staff of talented, professional journalists, many of whom regarded getting a job on the Mail as having arrived at the top of South African journalism, in a sort of South African Fleet Street.

Their political sympathies were across the board though they were never asked to disclose them, from communist to Nationalist, but when on the job, political attitudes did not count. Thus it was that Afrikaans- speaking journalists who no doubt voted for the National Party at elections, were proud to be working on the Mail and applied professional standards in producing their stories.

Journalists’ enthusiasm for the paper was legendary and frequently resulted in reporters working way beyond the call of duty and on occasion placing themselves in dangerous situations. They brought more South African-style Pulitzer prizes to the Mail than any other paper was able to gather.

Their conduct led to two American academics, journalism studies Professor John C Merrill and assistant Professor Harold A Fisher, in 1980 listing the Mail in their selection of 50 of the World’s Great Dailies.

A few were African National Congress cadres engaged in underground activities but they tried hard not to embarrass the paper and seldom did. A fair number, especially the black reporters, were roughly handled or assaulted. Several went to jail to protect their sources; others were incarcerated by the police for suspected subversive activity. We regarded these jailings as attempts by the authorities to silence them as journalists, and sometimes, perhaps, halt their “extra-mural” political activities though we never conceded that. We continued to pay their salaries unless they were convicted, which seldom happened.

Even the police spies who wormed their way into the newsroom and may not have privately been proud of working for the Mail did the job professionally. The main reason, of course, was their need not to do anything that would betray their real calling.

Police attempts to recruit staff as spies were constant, judging by the number of journalists who reported being approached and of having rejected the offers. Rejecting the police was not without its dangers but they did so, nevertheless.

The paper’s journalists were embattled on all sides. They were accustomed to anger and displeasure from the authorities and conservative whites outside the building, but they were also aware of the often angry reaction of staff members in other departments to the paper’s anti-apartheid policies, particularly in the desperate 80s when President Pieter W Botha instituted the myth of a “total onslaught” being waged against South Africa, unrest was proliferating and powerful state-of-emergency laws were introduced to try to deal with rising anger and disaffection among the country’s black people.

The country was tense and edging ever more to the right to support “law and order” and it was no different in the Saan building. The non-editorial departments complained that the paper’s policies were an obstacle to them promoting their business operations; and there was ill-concealed dislike of the editorial staff.

Some months before the closure managing director Clive Kinsley bitterly tongue-lashed Rand Daily Mail editor Rex Gibson at a dinner with the chairman, Ian Macpherson, over the high esteem in which the Mail’s editorial staff held themselves while it was the denigrated management that kept the company afloat — except, of course, that the company was sinking.

This active dislike of the paper and its policies by the other staff — though not all; there were some loyal supporters of the paper — management and board contributed to the decision to close the paper. The management decision to centralise the separate advertising departments dedicated to each paper into a single operation resulted in the Sunday Times — an easy sell — growing fatter and the Mail and Sunday Express being starved; coupled with this was the decision by Saan to break from the industry-wide circulation company, Allied Publishing, losing millions on conducting its own circulation operation. Some people feel that the story of the paper’s losses was readily seized upon as a handy excuse to close it.

There was also the story of the new M-Net TV licence being given to the newspaper industry on condition that the Mail was closed, though this has never been confirmed. Then the indifference of Anglo American which did not want to be seen to be in control of the English press, as indeed it was, came into play. Anglo-American could have intervened — indeed legendary editor Laurence Gandar, former editor Allister Sparks and myself tried on three occasions in three years to persuade the Anglo American director Gordon Waddell, who was Saan chairman from 1983 to 1985, to take strong action against the management — but nothing happened and the paper was closed.

President Botha cheered the closure, congratulating the paper’s owners and bestowing an award on Anglo American chairman Harry Oppenheimer, though it has never been confirmed that there was a causal connection between the two events.

But the real damage caused by that ill-considered shameful closure of the Mail has been visited on the practice of journalism in South Africa. Australian and some British papers profited when the Mail closed and some of its best journalists emigrated. In Australia they are still improving the quality of papers such as the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. The Mail’s exceptionally strong competitive influence has not been replaced, nor has the strong Morning Group news pool arrangement and the result is a still-deteriorating standard of journalism, a reduction in the gathering and dissemination of news on a nationwide basis and the general impoverishment of the public’s right to know.