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During the news literacy workshop, we had different speakers from different media companies and Quan Dambuza was one of them. Quan is the founder of Pondoland Times, a local newspaper from the Eastern Cape and an Eagles Business award-winning company.
Quan explained how challenging it is to own a local newspaper in your hometown. He mentioned most of the challenges he comes across when covering stories and the community. “Alfred Nzo and OR Tambo district municipalities are amongst the largest district municipalities in the Eastern Cape making it very difficult to cover the area and distributing the paper takes longer though we always finish on time. He also explained how not having the needed equipment for your company is a struggle for them since they are forced to print their newspapers from KZN and which is costing them money for transportation.
“Running a company and being the editor at the same time it’s exhausting since sometimes I get sleepless nights trying to get the work done and managing, raising funds and running our digital platforms where we post online readers”, he added.
In cases where there’s a sensitive story in the community that involves one of the reporters, we assign another reporter that is not from that area and is not heavily involved in that story so that we cannot be seen as biased or taking favors.
Quan says “The cost of printing a newspaper is quite high and it became worse when the Ukrain/Russian war intensified because rates increased two times in the last 12 months. Another challenge is getting long-term advertising or getting advertising from corporates, SMME’s also do not understand the importance of advertising their businesses.”
He also stressed that local publishers also struggle to maintain online presence but as Pondoland Times they have managed to keep their website online ever since they launched the newspaper.
“We have never had a single day where our website was down. We also place more emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing which has resulted in 3,6 MILLION website impressions (at the time of publishing this article).”
“Coming across fraudsters pretending to be copyright lawyers. These people have sent us fake invoices claiming we have breached the copyright act by using Google Images they own, when in actual fact they do not own these photographs. Being part of the Association of Independent Publishers (AIP) helped us because they were able to take the matter up and Groundup published a story on this,” said Quan.
