Chapter One – From strength to vulnerability

Chapter 29 – Perspectives on change at the Mercury

The period covered by this book represents a particularly turbulent one in the long history of the Mercury. I have given an account of what happened, but I think it is also useful to give an impression of how the turbulence, uncertainty and change was seen by some of the people most affected by it – by the staff and others at Natal Newspapers.

1. 
   Jimmy McMillan’s editorship and subsequent changes
   

Greg Dardagan, who had worked on the Daily News before joining the Mercury in 1984, said his impression on joining the Mercury from the Daily News was that the Mercury was “far more conservative”. He said: “Jimmy McMillan was seen as the conservative editor and Michael Green (of the Daily News as the verligte editor. They were actually labelled like that. People in Durban saw Jimmy as very conservative, upholding traditional values, and Michael Green being far more liberal. They used to be invited to debates on radio along those lines. Jimmy would ply the conservative line, very National Party supporting. There were criticisms, but when it came to the bottom line on who we supported, I think it was the government of the day, whereas the Daily News was very different. Jimmy was conservative in his politics. I don’t think so in his lifestyle, far from it.

“Those were difficult times to work in. You had to be very brave to go against the flow. He went with the flow. That style suited him. There was no confrontational politics.
“The management style at the Mercury was very olde worlde. Jimmy was the law. He laid down the law and that was that. I still remember a notice he put up on the board once, which said: ‘People, I have noticed, have got into the practice of knocking once on my door and just walking in. This must stop. In future, you will knock, wait, and if you are told to come in, then come in. If you don’t receive an answer, check the light. If the light’s red, make sure you don’t come in.’ Jimmy had two lights on top of his door. One was red and one was green. The idea was, if you knocked and the light went green, you came in. If it was red, you stayed out. If you were an average reporter, you wouldn’t have done that. You would have been too shit-scared, actually, to have gone there. You would have told the editor’s secretary you wanted to see the editor, and you would have asked for an appointment.
“At the old Mercury building, the newsroom was on the second floor and the editors were on the third floor. There was a spiral staircase that led from the newsroom up to the editors. Jimmy didn’t come down a lot. He would spend a lot of time on the third floor. And quite often reporters hadn’t met him. They had been employed and been interviewed by the news editor or somebody else. They wouldn’t have met Jimmy.
“I saw, once or twice, incidents where Jimmy would come down the good old spiral staircase. You used to hear clip-clop and you knew the boss was coming down the stairs. And Jimmy would appear at the bottom of the stairs and would look over his demesne. And some innocent and well-intentioned reporter would go up to him and say: ‘Excuse me sir, can I help you?’ And he would say: ‘What do you mean? I’m the editor!’ That happened more than once.
“It was very much old management style, where people knew their place. The subs room was an amazing place. All the subs had to wear ties. You weren’t allowed to eat or drink anything at your desk. It was a U-shaped subs’ desk, with the top desk at the bend and the guys down the sides. They had a little side room. If you wanted to eat or drink or smoke, you had to go to the side room. And that was strict. You obeyed that. The guy who was the night editor at the time had the nickname ‘Jackboot’ because of that. That was Ralph Hawkins. He really terrorised people. He and his lieutenants John Barker and Roddy Macmillan caused many reporters to have tears and breakdowns. People were actually fearful if ‘Jackboot’ called them in. If there was a problem with a reporter’s copy, they would be called in and get bollocked out. On festive occasions, you were not allowed to have a glass of wine at your desk. If they saw that, it was instant dismissal.”
Dardagan said the Mercury as a paper concentrated almost solely on hard news, with no space for features. The page opposite the leader page was used for international news.
In the difficult days of the state of emergency, in the second half of the 1980s, Dardagan said “the Mercury played the game in terms of the emergency regulations, like most papers. We had all the regulations stuck op on the windows of the office. We had our lawyers on call all the time. The lawyers came into the office, and basically subbed the copy. Michael Hands used to do it. The lawyers used to come in quite often and just read through a batch of stories. Michael Hands did it as a matter of practice for quite a long time. He would come in and just go through the copy and make changes. We were forever referring to him.”
That was how Greg Dardagan saw things at the Mercury in those times. This scene was so different from what I had experienced on The Star in Johannesburg, under Harvey Tyson’s editorship. Every time new laws or regulations came out, we would go to the lawyers and ask them to find loopholes for us. They would come back and suggest we try this or that, and then it was over to us to do what we could. Only in extreme cases did we hold up stories for special direct reference to lawyers, but they were at the end of a telephone line, and were very prompt in dealing with cases where we needed help urgently.
Dardagan said that at the Mercury he could recall no plan to try to find loopholes in the law. The paper operated to keep itself out of trouble. If there was doubt, the lawyer was called in.
Anne Stevens’ view of the paper under Jimmy McMillan was that it was “essentially a white, Durban, middle-class, family newspaper. JDR (John Robinson) you hardly saw, but he still had his fingers controlling. He knew quite well any staff who got into embarrassing situations even in their personal lives. He would not tolerate that, if you embarrassed the company.”
Jimmy McMillan as editor was “upper middle class and country club and very much Durban”, Anne said. “He had no interest in art and culture and things like that. He was a hard-news man, and regarded the rest as fripperies really, sort of a waste of time. He saw feature pages as superfluous. The Woman’s Weekly supplement was OK, because that was for women, and they had to have something to amuse themselves. Arts he didn’t understand, didn’t follow, just had to have some of it in the paper. I don’t think he had very much sympathy for that.
“He didn’t go out much. He was very much country club. He enjoyed things like golf and growing roses. He wasn’t a social man. He wouldn’t be seen around town. He wouldn’t go to functions. I don’t think he would like to do what editors now do, being seen around representing their newspaper.”

2. 
   My editorship
   

From the time of my arrival at the Mercury at the beginning of 1991, I was regarded with interest by the Natal Newspapers establishment. The Mercury staff first regarded me as a breath of fresh air, but later there was so much change and upheaval and job insecurity that, as the one holding responsibility for the changes, my popularity waned noticeably, though there was some sympathy for my predicament.

Part of the establishment at Natal Newspapers wanted to rule me. The indignation of the marketing and research department over changes I made without consulting them (I had consulted the company’s national market research unit) was very evident, but their instruction to me never to do such a thing again had the effect, I must admit, of making me resolve never to become a captive of management, though I was prepared to work with them.
My brief from Peter McLean on being appointed was to compete with the Daily News and try to close the circulation gap between the two papers. Natal Newspapers management, on the other hand, would not allow the Mercury to compete with the Daily News, its market leader. I discovered this fact the hard way, not by being told, but by being obstructed. I added to the problem by consulting management too little, mainly because I realised very quickly that transparency on my side on any new initiatives was used by management to develop protective strategies for the Daily News.
One management for competing titles was an impossible situation. Only after the Tippler recommendations were implemented did it become possible to resolve this stultifying disability.
David Braun, former Mercury assistant editor who later worked as an assistant editor on the Sunday Tribune, believed the appointment of van Schoor as editor-in-chief of Natal Newspapers was not beneficial to the Mercury. “Editorial autonomy was already being white-anted by management’s constant sniping at the way you managed the paper. I had several run-ins with Natal Newspapers’ management about their guerilla tactics against you and, ultimately, against the Mercury itself.”
Braun’s impression was that general criticism from management directed at me related to what they believed the focus of the Mercury should be and the target market they would have liked to define for the Mercury. “Van Schoor was given the authority to rein you in with his appointment as editor-in-chief”.
Braun identified Tony Hiles as one of my main critics, something I had always been aware of, but he also defended Hiles. “There are many good things to be said about Hiles. He did run the company in an unorthodox way. He was the real power in the company and he surrounded himself with people who were very loyal to him and who were expected to toe his line. However, he was very effective in making money. I was attracted to his wheeling and dealing character. I like to think I did more than a little in putting the record straight about the Mercury with him and his camp.”
That is a well-merited tribute to Hiles. He did have a wheeler-dealer style, and he opposed many of my projects for reasons he did not disclose to me, but of all the executives at Natal Newspapers, he understood the market conditions of Durban and kwaZulu Natal the best. He had a nose for profit, and for what would not make a profit, but he was rather insensitive to issues editorial people put higher on the scale. Perhaps that was the reason he opposed me. I was pushing editorial values. He was pushing short-term profit, with little room for investing in future long-term growth and profit.
Because of editorial rivalries, Braun’s impression was also that van Schoor opposed me often, though he too did not do so directly to my face. I had travelled a long road with him, and we had been editorial rivals for promotion, but in other respects I had felt we got on fairly well.
Of my editorship, Braun said: “I always felt you were badly short-changed by management. Towards the end a lot of this cropped up among the Mercury’s own staff. What you did for the Mercury was to shift it from a government-supporting, complacent institution, to a liberal mouthpiece, far more in keeping with the times. I used to tell Leon Marshall you were better suited to run a big newspaper like The Star, because you had such big expectations of a small, rather inexperienced staff. You were right to have those expectations, but the staff did not have the culture or experience to live up to them. There were in any case too few of them to try to cover the news as comprehensively as you wanted them to.
“I think the record shows that the editorials published by the Mercury on your watch were lively, informative, entertaining and always courageous and moral. At a time when there was growing confusion about the future role of the newspapers, you stuck to what you believed in. I particularly liked the way you stood up to the forces from within the company. I also saw you as compassionate. You tried very hard to save jobs when the downsizing disease took hold, and you succeeded, much to the annoyance of van Schoor, Booth and others.
“You were the last in the tradition of autonomous, proudly independent editors who refused to be pushed around by management. You resisted being reduced to being merely the editorial keeper of the bottom line.
“I can’t imagine the future for the Mercury. The paper certainly has gone through some turbulent times and it has changed so much because of it. I guess that the destiny of the paper really depends on the future of South Africa itself. Maybe some day another great editor will rise to lead the Mercury again. Maybe the paper will simply continue to ebb away, becoming an even dimmer ghost of what it used to be.”

3. 
   David Wightman and the future
   

I asked David Wightman, my successor for a view. He said: “In Ben Bradley’s book, which is called The Good Life, he says in the prologue that he was lucky that he joined the Washington Post as editor when it was ready to fly. And I find myself joining the Mercury when you have done a lot of very difficult foundation work and really it was at a stage where it was ready to take off. So from that point of view I was extremely fortunate.

“And I think for the staff, who had then gone through very difficult and unsettling times, it was quite useful that there was a change in pace and personality and that they were looking for a way to develop the paper and they were in the process of doing it wonderfully.
“I believe the paper is now on the right track. My vision is that it will become a paper of great quality. I think the Mercury spirit has returned. The paper is really looking to the future.”