BY HENRY KAHARA
The People newspaper will relaunch its Sunday edition from April this year, credible sources have confirmed to Media Review, seeking to ride the election wave ahead of the next general elections to drive up readership numbers and advertising.
Media Max, the Uhuru Kenyatta-owned media investment company that bought the newspaper from Kenneth Matiba, has been recruiting journalists both at the head office and across the bureaus to beef up its team. The biggest catch has been Chris Odwesso, who has joined the company as special projects editor to replace Douglas Okwatch who was poached by CCTV as African affairs editor.
Odwesso, a former editor-in-chief of the collapsed Kenya Times, also worked for Kenya Today, which folded a few months ago due to mismanaged that starved operations of cash. The People on Sunday will hit the newsstands on April 1 (no April fool’s here).
It is said Odwesso, who teaches media studies at Kenya Polytechnic, will be in charge of quality and double as Sunday managing editor and will be assisted by Eric Nyakagwa, the political editor. The newspaper has also bought a new printing press, which is being tested with dry runs ahead of the launch of the Sunday edition. There will be a new separate team for Sunday and online.
The company stopped publishing on Sunday in 2008 for restructuring, squeezed out by revamped completion from Nation and Standard. The new edition will be bigger at 64 pages. The editorial policy will lean towards matters that affect the ordinary folks, angling stories on how issues affect people socially, politically, economically and so on.
“It is the people that matter; that is the maxim,” said a senior editor at The People. “No much focus on personalities, though that is hard to deliver sometimes.” This comes less than a year after the paper was relaunched with a redesign and transferred its editorial offices from Union Towers to Norfolk Towers to join its sister companies Kameme FM and K24. The company though still retains some offices at Union Towers Uhuru Kenyatta bought the TV and radio stations from Rose Kimotho.
With his feet firmly in politics and nurturing presidential ambitions, Uhuru is consolidating media outlets to take care of his interests and control an uncensored campaign machinery. People started as a weekly newspaper in 1992 during the multiparty time, owned by veteran politician Kenneth Matiba, and gained for its Bold, Frank and Fearless slogan to which it lived in the strictest sense of the words.
The paper went daily in 2000 and has since then never recovered from a slump in readership that followed drop in quality of stories and a hemorrhage of seasoned journalists due to low pay. At one point it slipped into the red and had to change names from Kalamka Ltd to People Ltd to avoid the auctioneer’s hammer until Uhuru came in to save it. Currently it is published five days in a week.
The Sunday edition will be up against market leader Sunday Nation and Sunday Standard as well as Sunday Express. The shareholding structure is a bit cloudy. Someone familiar with the company’s affairs said there’s no direct investment by the Kenyatta family or the other big guns from Central. The investors operate through consortium called TV Africa Holdings.
The other investors include the late Njenga Karume, and sources said Matiba retained minority shares. Her daughter, Ivy, who was relieved of the MD’s position, still sits on the board though she moved to Alliance Group. The People Ltd was to convert to Kalamka Ltd and venture into property which would be anchored by a shopping complex at Mlolongo.
