Ryland Fisher

Vincent Naidoo was not a well-known name outside the media industry, but he was respected by those who knew him or were privileged to work with him. In many ways, he knew much more about journalism and the media industry than many of the editors he had to serve over the past two or three decades. He was a silent force of strength behind many great editors.

Vincent passed away on Tuesday (1 December 2020), at the young age of 52, after suffering a heart attack and his memorial service was held today (Saturday 5 December 2020). Like many of his former colleagues, I watched the service online. I wished I could have been at the service in Johannesburg and I wished that many more people paid tribute to one of the silent giants of the media industry.

I worked with Vincent at the Sunday Times 25 years ago, but we kept in touch over the years. He was one of the people I made a point of catching up with whenever I visited Johannesburg in the days before COVID-19 when we could still fly all over with gay abandon. I also saw him a few times when he visited Cape Town on business.

I was an assistant editor at the Sunday Times in Johannesburg in 1993 when my editor, Ken Owen, asked me to take on the project to transition the newspaper to fourth-wave technology. What this meant was that we had to move away from producing the paper on our archaic ATEX machines to personal computers. This involved formatting software which would enable us to write our stories and design our pages on personal computers. We would no longer have to cut and paste but could do everything online.

I had no experience of coding but with the help of Vincent and his IT colleague, Harry Hall, we managed to pull off the great transition. The editor agreed to let a sub-editor, Doug Goldsmith, join the team and we worked literally 24/7 for the whole year. We became close friends in the process.

On the night when we were ready to go live with producing the whole of Business Times on the new system, the four of us (Vincent, Harry, Doug and me) stayed at the office waiting for the paper to start printing. It was a Friday night (Business Times gets printed before the main body of the paper) and at about 11pm, we were called by the printers because they were ready to start our print run.

We noticed a rather serious gremlin in the software which we had missed, despite severe testing and, for the first and last time in my life, I had to shout “Stop the press!” so that we could fix what was wrong. I think we got home at 3am and were back at work at 8am to work on the main body of the Sunday Times on its deadline day.

I left the Sunday Times at the end of that year (1994) because I was offered a promotion at a paper in Cape Town, but never lost touch with Vincent.

Often on my trips to Johannesburg, we would meet up in Rosebank, so that he could stroll over from where he was still working for the owners of the Sunday Times, until they moved and we had to find a place to meet which was convenient for both of us.

Vincent would tell me about the work he was doing, which was not limited to traditional IT, but often involved helping with the redesign of newspapers. We also spoke about some ventures that we could tackle together.

He was sad when he had to leave the company a few years ago and tried to do some entrepreneurial stuff. Earlier this year, he joined Fundudzi Media, who had just bought over Sunday World from Tiso Blackstar, who used to own the Sunday Times and other titles.

A few months ago, Vincent called me and we spoke about his new job at Sunday World. He was very excited about the envisioned changes at the paper. That was the last time we spoke.

At his memorial today, Kabelo Khumalo, who represented Sunday World and Fundudzi Media, spoke about how Vincent was a loyal and competent colleague, but how he could also tell everyone what they needed to do in the newsroom.

Having known Vincent for so many years and having shared many discussions with him about the media industry and our mutual love, newspaper design, I think that he earned the right to tell editors and others how to do their work. After all, he probably knew much more than most of them.

At memorials and funerals, you often hear things about former colleagues that you might not have experienced in the workplace. It was no different in Vincent’s case, as we heard about his love for his family, his propensity to fix things around the house, his “blue” swimming pool and his cooking skills. We heard that he was an intelligent man of few words.

We knew some of these things. We knew his loved his family, because he would always show pictures of them when we met. We knew that he was a mean cook because he often shared meals with us, and we suspected that he was the kind of guy who fixed stuff around the house. He was like that at work too. We knew him as the soft, silent type, but we had a lot of respect for his knowledge.

It was clear at the memorial that his family is devastated at their loss. The media industry is also much poorer with the passing of a man who preferred to operate in the background but who could easily outshine many of those who stole the limelight.

I wrote this piece because I felt that I needed to pay tribute to somebody who helped me a lot in my journalistic career, but who will probably not be acknowledged with any awards or a proper obituary. Go well, my friend. Rest in peace.

(Written for this website on Saturday, 5 December 2020)