One of Southern Africa’s most arduous and under-rated sporting challenges is the Roof of Africa rally. The #RoofOfAfrica has had many formats since inception in 1967 but one of the highlights over years has been ‘Round the Houses’ which takes place through the streets of Maseru. Thrills and spills aplenty.
For those of us used to running or walking around our neighbourhoods, being confined to barracks is a real challenge. It is a strange quirk of human nature that it’s only when something is taken away from us that we begin to value it. Like nipping out quickly because you’ve run out of wine for instance. That’s what happens when you don’t stockpile.
So we’ve had to innovate. I was really impressed to see @EWN reporting that a couple of Saffers in Dubai recently completed a “balcony marathon”. Now sadly, my days of running Comrades are over but that doesn’t mean I can’t rise to a #Lockdown2020 challenge myself.
So today I completed my first #RoundMyHouse 5km walk. 200 laps around my small house in Kensington. Now it’s not quite up to #RoundTheHouses in Maseru or a balcony marathon in Dubai but it’s not without its challenges. Some very tight cornering through the garage and a really tough section though my wife’s rose garden.
In fairness to her I hold myself entirely responsible for the unpleasant incident with the Bougainvillea: I promised to cut that back weeks ago. Also the #RoundTheKitchen loop has way too many distractions for a Corona athlete in training and will be removed from future events.
A huge heartfelt thank you to everyone out there who is putting themselves at risk to keep the newspapers going.
But something else was nearly taken away from us this week. Something that everybody has been writing off as a medium for years. Newspapers. It’s really been a revelation, even in a TV and digitally-driven landscape, to be reminded that newspapers are still an essential news service for many people.
The sound of the Sunday Times whirling over the wall onto the verandah this morning injected a surprisingly reassuring normality into the day.
A huge heartfelt thank you to everyone out there who is putting themselves at risk to keep the newspapers going.
In this regard hats off as well to Caxton for making the commitment to keep on distributing local newspapers and to bring local news to the communities during Lockdown2020, despite not being able to carry loose inserts over this period.
Without the commercial injection from loose inserts this is a seriously costly exercise but strategically it may well the litmus test for answering the many naysayers who still think of these titles as wraparounds for carrying inserts rather than legitimate newspapers in their own right.
There’s a Master’s thesis in there somewhere.
The latest Establishment Survey (ES2019 AB) covering the period January-December 2019 indicates that readership of a ‘printed copy’ of a newspaper has stabilised since 2017.
| Source: ES 2019 AB | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | |
| Read Newspapers: Weekly % | Total Pop | 39.3% | 37.6% | 36.4% |
| SEM_C4&5 | 58.8% | 55.8% | 55.5% |
When one out of every two top-end consumers still reads a printed newspaper every week it’s hard to dismiss the medium. What publishers and their research arm, the PRC, need to do is repurpose newspapers and reposition the medium in the minds of digital-native media strategists.
The real barrier to the viability of newspapers as an advertising medium is not efficacy but the simple corollary that when you’re selling ad space to digital natives you need to accept that they are also newspaper immigrants.
First sell the medium. Then sell the title.
Not that I want to put up any barriers myself by exaggerating the difficulty of doing the #RoundMyHouse #LockDown challenge. Everyone should have a go.
To be honest, I think the hardest part is not spilling your wine.
Gordon Muller is Africa’s oldest surviving media strategist. Author of Media Planning – Art or Science. Mostly harmless! Read his Khulumaedia Blog here.
