City Press's big, glossy bid to expand market share

3 Oct 2011

Media24 is opening its cheque book in a big way for City Press's new magazine, which premiered as a supplement to the newspaper this past Sunday, 2 October 2011. Big on luxurious eye-candy and sporting good writers, i magazine has potential, but is it distinctive enough to make readers want to hang on to it past Monday morning?

In most neighbourhoods Mondays are trash days. Those municipal garbage trucks come round and harvest the waste. For those people who can't be bothered with recycling, this means the Sunday Times or City Press hits the bin almost immediately after the read is done.

City Press's Ferial Haffajee hopes to change that by emulating offshore markets where newspaper magazines have added staying power to Sunday reads and made them last a lot longer than just one day.

"The motivation is that the best Sunday newspapers around the world have good quality magazines which have worked incredibly well to enhance those newspapers' value. We're hoping that by adding the magazine that City Press will now have a longer shelf life," says Haffajee, who's been at the head of Media24's English Sunday title for just over two years now. She came in with a strong mandate to turn the paper around and grow market share.

Continue reading the full story on www.dailymaverick.co.za.

About Mandy de Waal: @mandyldewaal

Editor, writer and researcher. *Editor of #TheFutureByDesign & The Africa Annual *Published in Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs *Published in Rolling Stone Magazine, The Guardian (UK), Daily Maverick, Finweek, Mail & Guardian, City Press, Rapport, Moneyweb, Noseweek; Brainstorm Magazine; ITWeb, and MarkLives. *Before becoming a full time writer, de Waal founded brand agency Idea Engineers, and led the Cape Town office of Text 100.

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