The Africa Cup of Nations, the continent’s premier football showpiece, has long been seen as an opportunity for Senegal’s print media, especially those specialising in sport, to reboot economically, depending on the fortunes of the national team.
But with the development of audiovisual media and most recently the Internet, its financial revenue base has been thinning over the years, prompting it to reinvent itself in a desperate bid to survive.
“The written press not only competes with the audiovisual media, but also with the Internet. This is a sector where the impact on revenues is decreasing year after year,” said Mamadou Ibra Kane, editor of the sports daily Stades, one of Senegal’s most widely read specialist newspapers.
His heartfelt cry is explained by the fact that many advertisers are now turning to audiovisual media, which in turn offers them better visibility through sound and image media… to the great discomfort of the written press, which is left scraping for crumbs from advertisers.
The latter, however, is not prepared to say die. To build loyalty among its traditional customers or attract other advertisers, it is finding a coping strategy, namely highlighting insertion offers on several pages of the newspaper, said Kane, who is also CEO of the AFRICOM SA group, publisher of Stades.
For their part, radio and television stations, in addition to broadcasting matches live, host debriefing sessions on matches.
Faced with this new competition, the daily press instead offers “post-match talks.”
This includes journalistic genres such as analysis, exclusive interviews with players present at the competition and interviews by the daily’s special correspondents.
“So there is a kind of rewriting of the form book of the written press,” Kane said.
Despite this difficult situation for the print media in general, Stades’ publishing director acknowledged, like Hubert Mbengue, his counterpart at Record, another sports daily, that the AfCON, like other major sport competitions, is an opportunity to increase circulation.
“With this AfCON, unlike the previous editions, we will have a return on investment because we have a strong circulation of 40,000 to 60,000 copies at least every time Senegal plays. And the longer Senegal stay in the competition, as it is now, the better for us,” he said.
However, he added, his newspaper normally commands a readership of between 25,000 and 30,000 people.
This significant added value, he explained, allows him to make his company profitable even if the benefits of AFCON moments are even greater.
He said as proof, “70,000 copies were sold after Senegal qualified for the semi-finals of the current Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt. Having qualified for the final last Sunday thanks to a narrow 1-nil win over Tunisia, the Lions have gladden the heart of an entire country that has not experienced such glorious moments since 2002, but also a print press that is struggling to hold its own in the face of stiff competition by other information dissemination platforms.
“We are dependent on Senegal’s participation and performance at the AFCON. We live in the same situation as the sellers of jerseys at the market who only sell their goods when Senegal wins,” said Hubert Mbengue, whose daily newspaper Record is published by the Futur Media group belonging to the world famous musician Youssou Ndour.
Mr. Mbengue asserted that without the support of this major Senegalese media group, it would have been difficult for his newspaper, which has not yet existed for two years, to survive in the local media landscape.
ARD/te/lb/as/APA