Former City Times editor and MD of Amalgamated Press Kevin Keogh writes:
That the Benoni City Times has reached its 100th year comes as no surprise to long-term residents of Benoni, yet, like an ageing granny who has put on her best new frock, she must still be congratulated for doing so.
When William Hills laid down the foundations of the City Times, and later its sister newspapers in other East Rand towns, he set out solid parameters of good business practice, which became a go-to blueprint for successful newspapers in South Africa.
Perhaps more importantly, because above all, he was a dyed-in-the-wool editor. He buttressed his newspapers with sound, hard-hitting journalism.
This gave them almost entrenched credibility as training grounds for many young journalists who, having used them as stepping stones to learn their craft, went on to successful national and international careers.
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William Hills reasoned well-read newspapers garner prolific advertising support. Others do not.
He was right.
Successive generations of Hills’s – William’s son Billie and grandson Billy – who ran the newspapers after him, upgraded the business dynamics to fit changing times but stayed true to the baselines set out by the founder.
Under the editorship of no-nonsense Yorkshireman Sid Gill, who took over the job of group editor on William Hills’s death, good journalism was never to be sacrificed at the altar of commercialism.
At best, he conceded, the application of good practice might be dollied up to overcome the pedantic of what he termed “Spanish traditions” but the ethics and accuracy of what was being reported were sacrosanct.
I joined the City Times in 1973 with Sid as my uncompromising taskmaster. Suffering the ministrations of a man who was sometimes insufferable, I was taught enough newspapering to reach the “adequate” mark on his demanding performance yardstick.
By the time Sid Gill succumbed to throat cancer in the early 1980s, Amalgamated Press, the parent company for the Hills newspaper stable, had been absorbed by Caxton, the then growing young giant in the local newspaper world.
We were left more or less to carry on as before while Caxton took stock of us but, while we didn’t know it at the time, we were at the top of a foefie slide of change that would careen us out of the 20th century and into the 21st.
By that time, I had donned Sid’s mantle as editor and somehow found myself as managing director of the Amalgamated newspapers. I would not have survived without the technical skills, which the 6’ 6 works manager, Vic Cole, brought to the table or without the accounting know-how of the ebullient George Meyer.
Together, we formed what Hal Miller, onetime High Pooh-Bah on the Argus group, referred to as “the wolf pack”.
Eventually, Caxton hauled me out of Amalgamated Press, by then firmly entrenched in the Caxton family as the East Rand branch, and saw me thrust into myriad jobs, including, for my sins, editing The Citizen.
Meanwhile, the East Rand branch, like Topsy, just grew and grew until its reach, apart from its immediate family, grasped papers from Alberton, Kempton Park and beyond.
Sadly, and for business reasons, the Benoni City Times, once matriarch of the pack, was edged off the throne by The Boksburg Advertiser. To Benonians, though, she remained their beloved “Shitty Crimes”.
Sadly, too, her once responsible, all-inclusive and painstakingly accurate news reportage has fallen foul of the Twitter, WhatsApp and other “social media” miscreants.
Crisp reporting has been supplanted by the rambling demands of electronic media.
Covid-19, too, has slashed reporters’ numbers and left the remaining trained craftspeople at the mercy of unwashed scribblers.
But there is hope for the Benoni City Times as it enters its second century and can look forward to pandemic-free normality.
Only then will the City Times be able to give readers what they will never get from their cellphones and tablets: news they can use written by the people who know Benoni and the people who live in her.
Whatever happens, I wish the Benoni City Times a happy birthday and 100 more.
(Kevin Keogh is, inter alia, a former editor of the Benoni City Times and managing director of Amalgamated Press, the company, which used to own her. He is also a former editor and general manager of The Citizen Newspaper).
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