Go well, old Vrye Friend, let’s not give up

THE disappearance of the only progressive, enlightened, principled, opinionated, stubborn, brave, independent, empathetic and often laugh-out-loud voice in Afrikaans is a bitter pill for many to swallow.

I was too young and the politics too turbulent for me to really understand the impact of the closing of the print version of Vrye Weekblad in 1994. It seemed quite strange, though, because the bad news came after the newspaper had successfully defended a high court case against gen. Lothar Neethling. But then he appealed and won, with costs.

I felt the impact of the closing of the first digital version in 2022 the worst. Things were going badly in the country. Our parliament building had burned down and was irreparably damaged, almost as final confirmation that everything was falling apart and as an omen of things to come. Major floods crippled KwaZulu-Natal, almost 500 people died.

The long heavy drag of Covid hung over everything, the Zondo report had come out a few months before with its damning evidence of state capture and the National Prosecuting Authority did not exactly jump on it. It was clear by this time that Ramaphosa would not be the president to put South Africa on a whole new path to victory, the economy was in shambles and no end to the power cuts was in sight.

And then Vrye Weekblad closed its doors. I experienced this as a reader and I really felt that my last connection to a significant group of people from my own tribe, who at least thought a little like I thought, was being cut off. The impact on me surprised me.

And now here we are again. It is very different when you are part of the editorial team. Actually, I don't yet know exactly how to feel about it.

There will be grave dancers ... 

Without any doubt, a line is already forming of the knuckle-draggers and other miscreants who want to dance on the publication's grave, and that's fine. They like to party. South African far-right organisations masquerading as civil rights organisations are at their strongest since 1994, and this is not only a bad thing. AfriForum and Solidarity do good deeds too, the most important of which is giving shape to clauses in the constitution on the rights of minorities.

But someone should have regularly reminded the world that as organisations and people they do not come from a world and culture where inclusivity, human rights, reconciliation, diversity, social justice to all, various forms of redress of brutal injustices from the past and indiscriminate Christian fellowship and love count among their basic instincts.

Even though they wear the mask of the constitution and busy themselves with various virtue-signalling cases in which they handle mostly desperate black people's court cases, the basic instincts of these people are still to portray themselves as victims in the midst of a sea of ​​greater misery than they will ever encounter.

1440 and later was another era

Either way, the downfall of Vrye Weekblad should in my opinion be seen as part of a large cycle of change in the media as a result of the internet revolution, the greatest in the reception and distribution of mass information since the development of Gutenberg's printing press around 1440.

Although Vrye Weekblad has been published digitally for the past six years, we are still essentially a magazine like those printed on paper. We come out once a week, with most of our articles in that current edition. Our articles are lengthy, longer than the average piece of reading on the internet or social media. Our social media presence is not impressive.

We haven't managed to grow our readership and subscribers to much more than the people who read us in 1994, the first time we closed, and people who were 30 years old then are now 60. We had a chance to expand our readership among millennials, the people who are now between 29 and 45 – that's the last generation that will still read magazines and long-form journalism. Most of the time when we reached out to them the response was positive, but we didn't have the staff and marketing budget to do this continuously.

I have worked in corporate media for 20 years, and the support that publications get from a corporate media group is immense. This is in terms of technology, administration (accounts, salaries, taxes, strategy and distribution), the massive marketing that is done in other publications in your group, at art festivals, through branded merchandise (clothes, braai bags, carrier bags, caps, camping stuff like lamps, etc, etc, etc,). It's in another class entirely.

Middle finger to the establishment

Vrye Weekblad was still being issued in the same way as in the late 1980s, by too few people, with too little money and a bit too much of a middle finger to the establishment. (Correction, probably too little).

From 2005, I sat in publishers' and editors' conferences for about 15 years and listened to people who had recently come from New York, owned an iPad and were walking up and down stages repeating one word over and over and over again. Monetisation. It means the most obvious thing that King Midas of Greek mythology could do to become wealthy – to turn shit into money. “Vergelding" (vengeance) would have been a great translation in Afrikaans, as it would have been perfectly appropriate.

Monetisation in 90% of cases referred to the dilemma of how to monetise things on the internet. How do you take a magazine like Huisgenoot, which was a huge money machine in any month between 1950 and 2010, put it on the internet, and extract an income from it that is even just half of what it made as a print magazine?

You see, for 100 years an old recipe or machine or structure, call it what you will, existed for the relationship between news media such as newspapers and magazines and manufacturers/wholesalers/ retailers of goods and services that worked equally well for parties on either side. In 1974, in South Africa, if you produced green dishwashing liquid in Johannesburg, and you wanted to sell it to dishwashing enthusiasts in Vredenburg by establishing your brand and advertising special offers, there was practically only one way: Huisgenoot. Okay, you also had Keur and Rooi Rose and Sarie and Die Burger but they were like magazines or newspapers – print products.

Well, you also had radio, and it was effective, but you couldn't do work with pictures and it didn't have as many specialist environments for niche products, such as selling ploughs in Landbouweekblad.

There was only one pipeline of one-way information between Johannesburg and Vredenburg and it worked for everyone and continued like that for almost 100 years.

Contract publishers and the end times

Then television came along in 1975, and it was a new pipeline, but so expensive that only the big brands such as Sunlight, Volkswagen and Coca-Cola could use it. But television didn't kill the print genie.

On the contrary, things went so well for the print media that more and more magazines and newspapers were opened, even when the internet made its appearance in the 1990s, since the South African economy was growing so agreeably. However, the party would not last long, and most of them flourished for a short time only.

Many elements of the media landscape have changed, but two in particular are important to magazines. Contract publishers emerged, to start with. Large retailers such as Woolworths suddenly realised that through their stores and various levels of contact with their customers and the internet, they could gather a massive amount of data, and publish their own magazine and other media products that were aimed solely at their customers.

In fact, filled with self-confidence (and arrogance), they realised they could do it so well that they could charge their customers for it. There would be such cool recipes and mixed drinks, and lifestyle articles and beautiful people and beautiful houses in it, that their customers would buy something that was really a big advertising medium for Woolworths.

End-times capitalism, people.

And so magazines like Woolworths TASTE were born, with the best editors, journalists, designers, stylists and other cool people who talk a lot and wave their hands around. This partially blew up the print media's exclusive information pipe through which they also ran advertisements.

And along came the internet

The other development, of course, was the internet. Not only did all kinds of big brands realise they didn't need radio and other people's magazines to market to their customers, the internet had completely removed the need for a middleman, a medium.

Why would I as a car manufacturer with a shockingly large marketing budget, advertise in Huisgenoot if I already know who all my customers are, if I can contact them in various ways through the internet, if I can advertise on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, or if I can have internet or social media campaigns designed by very smart marketing people amongst my own staff? The formula/system/machine that was in perfect balance in 1960 between media companies and big brands broke down.

This so-called digital migration from paper to the internet has not worked as well as everyone had hoped. The managers at the big company where I worked, who had to make the monetisation plan work on the internet, smoked more and looked around with more horrified eyes than those of any other smokers I had ever seen.

The main problem for readers is this means that big media companies, dubbed the “lame-stream media" by idiots like Steve Bannon, simply don't have the resources to keep credible, reliable and ethical publications running and to employ excellent journalists.

Just look at the list of print brands that we no longer have: Beeld, Volksblad, Die Burger Oos-Kaap, Rapport, City Press, Daily Sun, Soccer Laduma, Cosmopolitan, House and Leisure, Marie Claire, Finweek, and many more.

Good journalism suffers

Much more tragic than the collapse of Vrye Weekblad is that good journalism suffers, at the same time as it suffers the onslaught of a frenzied propaganda campaign from Washington as well.

The so-called mainstream media has made many mistakes – the biggest of which was probably the American media's trust in George Bush Jr. and his war cabinet, when they were out to convince the world in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this was a good enough reason to invade. This while ordinary South Africans almost to a man responded to gen. Colin Powell's presentation to the UN about weapons of mass destruction: “But now you're talking shit."

The mainstream media's credibility has taken a hit or two, that's for sure. But The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and The Guardian still have the strictest editorial and the best fact-checking processes in the world. Locally Netwerk24 and the Times are not too bad, while News24 is doing very well. Just not as well as the print products did. Not even close.

It's a shame Vrye Weekblad will soon no longer be. What a blow.

♦ VWB ♦

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