By Aisling McCarthy

Having covered numerous topics in her research career, such as the relevance of social mobility and the headspaces of audiences of various media, Kuper has a huge amount of insight into the world of media in South Africa, as well as their audiences. She also identified the gap in the market which the Daily Sun now fills. Its founding publisher, Deon du Plessis, also gave her the title, “Mother of the thing”.

At the MOST Awards in 2016, Kuper was awarded a new award, the Bell Award. The award was introduced in order to acknowledge an individual who does not necessarily work directly in the media but has made a significant contribution to bettering the media sector.

“I feel very privileged to have worked in the media research industry for so many interesting and meaningful years. Then, to receive the award felt like a beautiful cherry on the top!”

The value of surveys

Having invested much of her career into research regarding the views of the South African public, Kuper asserts the importance of research.

“The public and businesses are not divorced from one another and each feeds off the other. Surveys that help businesses fine-tune their products and services to meet the needs of their markets will benefit both.”

Through her research for futurefact, a survey that tracks major media, marketing and socio-economic trends in South Africa, Kuper says she has learnt that the public are becoming more and more conscious of service excellence and far more aware of advertising.

Kuper also believes there is a great deal of synergy between surveys and the media, as the media – as a business – benefits from the publication of opinion polls. However, she finds it very disappointing that most polls do not clearly state the sample size and the polling procedure, which can lead to a misrepresentation of the facts.

“The media can also capitalise on controversial opinion pieces which dissect the surveys, since these help to facilitate peoples’ social discussions and enhance their social media interactivity.”

Kuper says that with surveys, the most import thing is to ensure they have integrity at heart, because “research without integrity is not worth anything at all.”

Trends in SA’s media and marketing landscape

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Kuper says there were high levels of cooperation in the print industry regarding joint research efforts.

“Then, political forces, combined with business and economic forces, rocked the boat – creating new ownerships, content and political platforms for the press and electronic media and generally playing havoc with existing positioning, circulations and, most importantly, shifting audiences.”

This led to new opportunities for interactivity with readers, viewers and listeners, which social media has dovetailed with happily – leading to an exponential growth. Kuper says that the changes have shaken the SAARF audience measurement frame as issues with different media types. This resulted in the creation of separate joint industry committees, which will “hopefully provide very robust audience data to the benefit of all,” Kuper says.

The biggest challenge for many types of media is figuring out a way to integrate the disparate platforms to provide accurate audience figures for their content, and, in many cases, how best to monetise the digital space in the most effective manner.

How South Africans interact with the media

According to Kuper, one of the most interesting trends she has discovered through futurefact has been the increasing proportion of young people who feel they need news in their lives and who are very involved in political discussions.

Kuper says that when the Daily Sun began, a large portion of readers showed little to no interest in politics. However, as the political playing field has become more volatile and the race to win a little closer, a great number of South Africans have become more interested and opinionated. This has allowed journalists the opportunity to cover political stories more frequently and in more depth.

There seems to be a growing sense of depression about the negativity of the news that is available, and Kuper says that people are looking for some sense of alleviation from this. Secondly, the more the government speaks out against the media, the more the public seem to trust journalists and have confidence in them.

“This will have implications for the quality and outspokenness of journalism in times to come.”

Advice for the youth

Although research plays an important role in fact collection, Kuper says that good journalists are pivotal to creating good content.

“You can happily know that great media products are made by great editors and journalists, not by great research.”

She continues, highlighting the importance of precision journalism and that, in order to be accurate when using research, it is necessary to understand and explain the value and limitations of it. She also says that when writing, you have to “focus on what is interesting and not only on what is important”.

Secondly, she adds that journalists must understand that consumers do not want to spend money on media products that depress them – they want to consume media they are interested in. While not suggesting that all news should be “sunshine journalism”, she says it should contain some humour and light notes.

“Most of all, though, you need to be proud of a profession that helps to create a wiser and better-informed population and does so with integrity, telling the stories that matter to those who need to know.”

For more information, connect with Kuper on Twitter or on LinkedIn.