I walked into the office this week to find our front desk newspaper tray empty.
With this in mind, I hurried upstairs to the lady responsible for our statistics and other logistics, Carina Bester, to find out what the heck was going on.
The BEAT front page 5 October 2018
The young lady’s response was that for the very “first time” in our history, the previous edition of The BEAT newspaper was sold out at all selling points in and around Bela-Bela. Wow!
She was referring to the one with the headline “Hawks bombshell”, published on Friday 28 September.
The breaking story at the time was based on the dramatic arrest of three local policemen by the Hawks, in what was clearly a sting operation.
Carina was still to provide me with the latest statistics regarding the latest edition with the headline, “Accused number four!”
The only clue I have with regards to this one is that readers continued to descend on our offices to snap up copies, to follow the rippling effects such as bail application and so forth.
Receptionist Maria Makwela tells me she had her hands full, stopping some over-excited readers from taking away just too many copies, for one reason or the other.
Our man in Modimolle, Mzamane Ringane, tells me he has reason to believe the last three editions (remember “Racial divide”?) did exceptionally well, not only in his neck of the woods, but in
Mookgophong and Vaalwater as well.
With my own career dating back several years, the first time I heard of a sold out newspaper was when the weekly tabloid, Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, broke the story of the Apartheid hit
squads in the 1980s.
It was many more years later that almost all mainstream newspapers put up the sold out signs, at the breaking story of the release of Nelson Mandela from political imprisonment.
At the time I was a political reporter at a Pretoria-based daily broadsheet.
My favourite editor at the time, the late Deon du Plessis, nearly broke the records with the sensational headline, “Boeremafia!”
For the uninitiated, Du Plessis is the gentleman who started “Daily Sun”.
I for one, as the inaugural news editor at Sunday Sun, have never achieved the “sold out” record.
Against this background, you can imagine how humbled we are to have joined this exclusive great newspaper-manship collective of the Sold Out Club.
There are a number of compelling reasons why newspapers achieve this sort of success.
Among these is the straightforward breaking story, but there are behind-the-scenes strategies too which fall into place.
For instance, by the time we published the “Hawks bombshell” headline, mainstream daily newspapers had already gobbled up the breaking story.
We had to be strategic and come up with more details into the breaking story, such as exclusive pictures of the suspects making their way into the courtroom, backed up by in-your-face kind of
graphic design by Lesley Barnard.
TK Mashaba and Andries van der Heyde did a swell job in terms of pictures and story.
Then there was our colourful description of the huge number of spectators at the courts, and even the Public Order Policing re-enforcements brought in to keep order.
We would really love to hear what our readers have to say about this dramatic turn of fortunes for your favourite The BEAT.
— The BEAT
