By Herman Manson A group of six of the country’s best business journalists are about to cause a major upset in the local media landscape with the launch of their new digital venture, Currency.
They have left behind media houses that often treat journalists as interchangeable commodities. These companies cut costs to the one product that they have built their reputations and businesses on but have seemingly forgotten about: journalism.
So far the start-up team have bootstrapped the launch of Currency, which will offer an investigative view of South Africa’s business environment. But several brands (including NinetyOne, Everard Read gallery and Investec) have committed to advertising spend pre-launch, believing a healthy business press will have a positive knock-on on business sentiment and corporate transparency.
The A team, with ace design
The premise of the new publication is focussed on business intelligence — the story behind the story and why it matters. Co-founder and former Financial Mail (FM) editor Rob Rose says the new title will attempt to explain the economic world to readers. It will publish the main economic stories every day, and have an investigative business journalism news drop on Fridays.
Rose’s launch team includes a number of senior business journalists, including Giulietta Talevi, former money and investing editor at FM, Ann Crotty, former writer-at-large for FM, Vernon Wessels, former MD of public relations firm focused on financial writing and market intelligence as well as a former South African bureau chief for Bloomberg*, Sarah Buitendach, a former contributing editor to FM, and Shirley de Villiers, a former deputy editor at FM. There is also a group of freelance journalists in the mix, and more people are expected to join the team. Currency will also have content-sharing deals in place with a number of independent business publications.
Rose admits the financial journalism industry tends to be older and white, due to a lack of resources for training new, more diverse recruits. Currency aims to address this issue by launching a training program. It will invite new talent into financial journalism and help foster an environment where journalists are not only paid for their work but also achieve job satisfaction. This approach aims to keep them in the field rather than see them move into corporate comms.
Rose says design-wise Currency aims to set itself apart, to feel quite different and quite unique. It will take its inspiration from Air Mail, the digital title co-founded by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “If you look at a lot of the news sites, I think that they’re not exactly enticing towards readers. Air Mail is really gorgeous and it’s enticing to read.”
Why people have left news, and how to win them back
Currency will not be a grudge read, believes Rose, though that is what many online business news sites have become. “You read it and it’s ugly and you have to navigate around and you don’t quite know where you are,” he explains. “Newspapers used to help order your life. They told you what the most important stories of the day were by putting them on their front page. And you know if you read this on page five it’s less important [than the content on pages 1 through 4]. So I think it helped order people’s day. But I think websites now have such a proliferation of news that people feel overwhelmed. And that contributes towards people not engaging or switching off.”
Value is another reason people are leaving media behind—there just isn’t enough of it in rehashed press releases and super thin print publications, explains Rose. “Why would you buy something it takes you two minutes to go through and you get no value from. I think that’s what causes people to leave news — when you read something but you get no value for it.”
There are only a couple of stories that are really vital to understand every day, says Rose. “The idea behind Currency is to sift out the noise and deal with big stories that really matter.”
Currency‘s feature pieces will attempt to make sense of economic issues affecting readers. For example: how will not getting off the Grey list next year affect your life? “We’re also going to try and bring about greater financial literacy,” says Rose. “I think we have a massive financial literacy problem in the country — only 51% of the country is financially literate, according to the regulator. So you have a lot of people who just don’t understand the dynamics. You have stories playing out where some newspapers talk about banks making trillions a day through Rand price fixing, which is completely untrue. You have mass economic disinformation.”
It would also tackle issues around the NHI—“NHI is a great idea, but what are the trade-offs that have to happen,” asks Rose, who notes VAT will have to increase from 15 to 22 percent or that payroll taxes will have to rise. South Africans deserve to know, and the government isn’t talking enough about it, but Currency will.
Rose says Currency will probably publish print editions strategically should there be demand and funding. “Being a journalist who grew up in print, you tend to like print, but the costs of printing something and then delivering it is huge,” says Rose. “I do think print adds a sort of brand cache. You see some [business] titles still in print, but you’ve got to make sure it’s economically feasible. That’s where it gets very tricky for the publishers.”
Finding money is hard, even for money magazines
Launching an ambitious media project in SA isn’t easy. “We haven’t really raised the kind of money that we thought we would or we wanted to,” admits Rose. “We’ve raised some, but it’s still short of what we wanted.”
They hoped to raise R30 million, which would have funded the project for its first two years. “We initially thought that to set up a proper business newsroom, and do all the ambitious things we wanted to, like financial education and training [a new generation of financial] journalists, we figured something in the order of R30m would be needed,” says Rose. There are a number of individual investors that have committed to invest, but by and large the team have adjusted their budget and expectations, and assumed the risk and bootstrapped the publication’s launch, which is scheduled for early September. “We’ve been very selective of who we want to partner with, and who we want as investors, since the product must come first,” Rose adds.
Currency will rely on both subscription revenue and advertising for revenue. News24 has shown that people are willing to pay for news online, says Rose, while Daily Maverick proves newsletter sponsorships work really well.
“If you have a strong financial press, there’s more business confidence in society at large,” says Rose. “People trust that [corporations are] being held to account. That is good for a lot of reasons, like attracting foreign direct investment.
Looking at how thin in advertising a lot of the business press is today, are business brands (and their media agencies) failing their press? “There’s been a major disconnect between advertising and media agencies, I think, and these publications,” says Rose, who attributes this disconnect to at least some of brutal cost cutting right across the board in media over the past 10 years.
Future currency
The media industry has experienced a dramatic collapse of advertising support “which has really killed it”. Part of it is the shift in spend towards Google, and Facebook. “But certainly, you think that there were companies that should have completely understood the imperative to keep the business media alive,” adds Rose. “Studies point to strong business press leading to better price transparency and better confidence in the markets. And I think that there are some very short sighted people who didn’t get that.”
It’s one thing to have to have internal mailers from your CEO, but they don’t do much for how your company is perceived by stakeholders, by your employees, by staff, or by the pension funds that own you, as Rose points out.
Even if it was harder to raise funding than the launch team initially thought it might be, Rose is adamant that the business community should not be allowed to regret leaving behind an independent business press, only noticing what it lost once it’s gone. A key difference noted by various diplomats he’s interviewed over the years, between SA and other markets: the incredible independence and quality of a large section of its media.
Currency is bound to shake up the local business press, injecting a new ‘currency’ of ideas and perspectives into the industry. Ultimately Currency aims to improve readers’ personal currency by allowing them to understand the world around them.
- Correction 2024/08/15: We updated details on Vernon Wessels’ previous job titles. He did not run his own PR firm, he was MD at the firm. We regret the error.
Herman Manson is the founding editor of MarkLives and MarkLives MEDIA.
