Stephen Mulholland, who has died in Johannesburg at 89, was news editor of the Sunday Times, founder of Business Times, group editor of the Financial Mail and Business Day and MD of the holding company Times Media.
He was appointed MD in 1986 at the age of 50, when the company was South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN) and on the verge of bankruptcy. He knew exactly how to save it and, equipped with a ruthless, take-no-prisoners personality and drive, wasted no time.
A day after his appointment he flew to Cape Town, fired the general manager of the Cape Times and told the assembled staff their paper was “on its knees and drastic action is called for”. He announced he was going to sell the Cape Times building and printing press, cut its admin staff and move the journalists to the Argus building across the road.
Shell-shocked and angry, they demanded to know who he was. “I'm the boss”, he said. Within days he'd retrenched 2,200 employees in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Just over a year later, he returned to Cape Town and fired Cape Times editor Tony Heard.
SAAN was renamed Times Media and relocated from its decrepit, grungy building in Main Street, Johannesburg, to considerably more upmarket quarters in Diagonal Street. Within two years he turned a R19.4m-a-year loss into a R26.8m profit.
The son of a stonemason, Mulholland was born in Liverpool on May 11 1936. He lived in Ireland until 1938 when the family emigrated to South Africa. He grew up in the notoriously rough docklands area of Point Road, Durban. The first member of his family to attend high school, he matriculated at Durban High School.
He was a South African national swimming record holder and won a US swimming scholarship. After graduating with a BA in economics at Southern Methodist University he joined the Texas National Guard, served at Fort Knox and became a trainee securities broker at Merrill Lynch in New York.
Rejecting the offer of a full-time job there, he returned to South Africa and became a sports reporter on The Star. He joined the Sunday Times from the Rand Daily Mail finance section, promptly told editor Joel Mervis its finance page was rubbish and persuaded him to let him start Business Times, which he did in 1967.
In spite of considerable scepticism it became the biggest money spinner of the Sunday Times mainly through its lucrative appointments pages which by 1988 were regarded as a barometer of the economy.
Mulholland was always bursting with new ideas. Most were rubbish. Some were brilliant, like his idea for a Sunday Times colour magazine which started in the mid-70s, became a hit with readers and advertisers and enabled the Sunday Times to raise its cover price from R1 to R1.80 while keeping circulation around 500,000.
Mulholland had a volcanic temper which often turned the Sunday Times newsroom into a war zone. One day, when raging about something, he picked up a typewriter and hurled it on to the desk of the crime reporter, barely missing her. Journalists, who called Mulholland “mal hond” (mad dog), scattered.
He was obsessively competitive and hated to lose out on a story. He would sometimes send two separate teams to cover the same story without telling them. They'd end up competing fiercely with each other.
God help anyone who returned without the story. A reporter and photographer got to a house with vicious dogs at the gate. Rather than face Mulholland’s wrath, the reporter jumped the wall and sprinted to ring the front door bell while his photographer distracted them just long enough for him to get back over the wall in one piece. They got the story
God help anyone who returned without the story. A reporter and photographer got to a house with vicious dogs at the gate. Rather than face Mulholland’s wrath, the reporter jumped the wall and sprinted to ring the front door bell while his photographer distracted them just long enough for him to get back over the wall in one piece. They got the story.
He met his match when Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was in South Africa for talks with prime minister John Vorster. The Sunday Times had just started getting colour in the paper and Mulholland was determined to run a front-page colour picture of their meeting. But it had to be taken by Thursday to give an outside company time to do the colour separation.
A press conference had been called for Saturday. Mulholland kept harassing Vorster's office to get an early pic of the two of them. “We have a colour problem,” he explained, to no avail. At the press conference on Saturday, Vorster recognised the Sunday Times photographer and growled, “listen, you tell Mulholland I've also got a colour problem.”
In spite of reservations from some SAAN directors who sniffed that he was a “brash, brusque chap who goes around turning over tables and generally misbehaving” he became the fourth editor of the FM in 1978, raising its circulation from 21,000 to 32,000 and the cover price from 65c to R3.
Bored unless challenged, he jumped at an invitation in 1992 to turn around the troubled Fairfax newspaper group in Australia, which included the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. Though he was successful his “I am the boss” style didn't go down well. Within four years he was back in South Africa as chair of Incredible Connection.
Mulholland, who had been suffering from dementia, is survived by his third wife Lorraine and two children.
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