User:Mieliestronk/Niel Hammann

Dirk Daniël Hammann, known as Niel Hammann (born on 6 September 1937), is a retired South African senior journalist. He was Editor-in Chief of the Afrikaans weekly family magazine Huisgenoot and its sister publication You (English).

When Hammann took the helm in 1978, Huisgenoot was already the oldest Afrikaans magazine still in existence (it was established in 1916). This magazine and You are still published in Cape Town by the Media24 affiliate of the South African media giant Naspers.

Niel is widely recognised in South African journalistic circles for the way in which he not only saved Huisgenoot from probably closing down in the late seventies, but also for systematically reviving the magazine in his time of office to become the best-selling periodical in any language in South Africa. Naspers awarded him their accolade, while The South African Academy for Science and Arts (Afrikaans: Die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns) awarded him with their medal for excellence in journalism.

In the late seventies Huisgenoot's weekly sales dropped to 129,000, causing its publishers to seriously consider closing the publication.

When Hammann retired in the late nineties, he could look back on a career in which the magazine's circulation grew to more than 500,000 in 1987 (ABC six monthly figure), and a record high of 540,000 sales in one week in the 1990s. Huisgenoot had become the leading South African weekly. It was read by considerably more that two million people every week week (based on Average Issue Readership of more than 4 per copy sold).

As one writer has observed: "No other family magazine in the world was so successful, and it is no exaggeration, because its relative penetration of the market was unrivalled in international enterprise." .

The magazine You, which Hammann launched in 1987 as a kind of English "clone" of Huisgenoot, followed the same spiral upwards from the start, soon achieving second place on the popularity list for South African magazines.

Hammann's "winning recipe" was, among other things, to change the magazine's content to meet international standards which he had previously studied as London editor for Naspers' magazines. His way of thinking was widely copied in South African magazines.

The digital revolution hit printed publications hard at the start of the 21st century. Record highs in circulation as experienced in the eighties and nineties do not seem possible anymore, at least not for the forseeable future, it is realised in the journalistic milieu. One observation by an assistant editor of Huisgenoot in the eighties and nineties: "Maybe a golden age in the world of periodicals comes but once in country and will now come no more. For South Africa the Hammann era was such an age." .