Six months into her role as managing director of Arena Holding’s news and media division, Nwabisa Makunga tells Glenda Nevill she has a whole new perspective on the business of media.
Nwabisa Makunga’s 20-year career in news has been as journalist and editor. She moved from editing The Sowetan to Mahogany Row – the term long used to describe Arena’s C-suite – last November.
“I had a pretty solid understanding of the newsroom, be it at Arena or anywhere else in the world – but the last six months have turned that on its head,” she says.
“I’ve got a completely different perspective now, about how we need to think about journalism and sustainability; how we need to run it as a business, while maintaining our journalistic integrity.”
She’s now confronted with hard choices: “Not so much about today, but whether or not we’ll be sustainable in a year, in two, in five years, or in a decade.”
Making the transition
The transition from editor to manager hasn’t been without its challenges.
“I think it probably challenged me for the first two weeks or so. But I had to claim that space immediately and didn’t have time to think about it.
“I am constantly forced to think about how we’re going to be sustainable; how to protect journalists on the one hand, while also actively pursuing financial opportunities on the other,” she explains.
“I think perhaps the challenge for me was to try and translate that to colleagues, because suddenly I was no longer talking about a great story!”
Another transition was to thinking about the reader as a customer rather than someone simply consuming content. How to keep them, make them stay and “buy stuff”.
Customer at the centre of everything
“We’re looking at integrating how we put the customer at the centre of everything we do. How we make it easy for you, for example, to buy from us; how we make it easy for you to engage with us.
“If we don’t understand our customer, if we don’t have enough data on who our customer is, and what it is that they want, then we’ve kind of lost the game.
“So, since I’ve gotten here, the focus has been on building the system that will help us understand our customer and therefore, engage much better with them; to personalise experiences as much as possible… From a business strategy point of view, it’s the one thing we need to get right.”
That, of course, feeds into what advertisers want and need from Arena’s titles. “They’re the flipside of that coin,” Makunga confirms. “Advertisers keep our doors open – and we see our entire ecosystem as placing the people who do business with us at the centre of that system.”
Massive disruption
Makunga’s time spent serving on industry bodies such as the South African National Editors Forum and the World Association of News Publishers has made her critically aware of the massive disruption artificial intelligence has on the news business.
She leads the AI steering committee at Arena and is “leaping into the unknown” to understand the opportunities this presents. Staff are participating in an AI-readiness survey which the committee will use to gauge adoption and usage – and the company’s AI policy.
Despite all this busyness in business, Makunga says her work/life balance has actually improved. “While my life has become a lot more demanding mentally, it’s also a lot more structured, to be honest,” she says, admitting to a previously unhealthy relationship with urgency, as an editor.
“Everything that had to be done had to be done now – because I was chasing deadlines every single day. Now, I’ve learnt to shut down when I finish my day.
Hard to switch off
“I also had an unhealthy relationship with my phone and WhatsApp. I was always fidgety. I had to be on social media because I needed to know what’s going on in the news. And I realised that I just don’t know how to sit back and relax.”
Makunga is getting better at switching off but, she says: “It’s hard.”
With an AI framework to be introduced company-wide, and the macro issues of making media sustainable, Makunga will be more switched on than switched off as she completes her first year in the hotseat.
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