“Relevance is important in newspapers. If you make newspapers relevant to people, they’ll read them. Print is a great interface. There’s still a lot of good about it.”
Because the Internet has proved to be such as disruptive force, people “tend to speak about [newspapers] in apocalyptic terms”, says Dawes, “but the real fundamentals are still there: content is still king, and advertising still works.”
Duncan McLeod: One journalist who embraced the Web in its early days, Alec Hogg, believes the changes sweeping the newspaper industry are inevitable. “It’s finally online’s time,” he tells me over coffee at Melrose Arch, north of Johannesburg.
Hogg, who founded Moneyweb after years in the print media, says the business model for newspapers is in grave doubt. “When the Boston Globe closes, when the LA Times goes into receivership, there’s a message there. I love newspapers. I grew up with them. But the reality is that we in the media business sometimes misunderstand how people consume us.”
SHOOT: Some interesting perspectives. I bought a magazine today, Runner's World, because, on impulse, the cover stories appealed, it was directly and imperatively relevant to my mindset. Any content works that way.
But I think the future of newspapers in South Africa, and magazines, is grave. Why, because the future of industries across the board, globally, are pretty grave. But here's a surprise, I also think the future of online, in South Africa is grave. For the same and different reasons.
But before I elaborate, I think the future of online internationally is fairly good in relation to other industries, for the time being. In 2010, in South Africa, we will probably begin to see some nice acquisitive growth in South Africa [online] and there will be many bright forecasts such as Mr. Hogg has made, and Mr. Buckland. We have all been patiently waiting for it to happen. All things being equal, it shoulda coulda woulda happened.
Unfortunately, South Africa started its internet journey too late in the game, and with 5 or 6 million users in 2009, with the financial and resource constraints currently visiting us [World Financial Crisis, koo koo], there just isn't enough infrastructure already in place for it to become a ubiquitous self sustaining enterprise. South African web enterprises are struggling to break even. I don't think - having reached a critical financial phase as we have - many ever will. And when the recessionary realities are made manifest, you simply can't shoulder the burden of something that's not earning you moolah. Simple as that. I know, it's tragic.
So the internet in South Africa will become something like long haul flying in the future: an increasingly elitist enterprise, and expensive. Over the medium and long term growth is unlikely. I know, a radical departure from what our statistics are telling us right now. Why do I say this:
Firstly, I reiterate the financial crisis, which is currently being hailed as a 'recovery' [sorry, it may be a recovery but it'll turn out to be a pseudo recovery or a 'sucker's rally']. The reality of the financial mess is that there is fundamentally simply less money, fewer consumers, fewer people with jobs, less advertising etc etc. So you'll see a longish term contraction in revenues from the GDP's of entire countries to corporates. Not ending in 2010 or 2011. It's here for a while yet. Some of the companies that disappear now we will not see again. Ever. Some of those companies will be huge companies; possibly the likes of Transnet and Eskom. GM in the US has been resuscitated from the grave, but they won't last. Neither will FEDEX.
Perhaps, in South Africa, we will see SASOL taking over the energy duties of Eskom. But plenty of media companies, bigger players, will disappear. Cellular service providers will do the same, but at a perhaps lower rate of attrition initially. Same with insurers, construction companies, mining companies. Smaller companies, very small mom and pop operations that are cheap and efficient and provide a valued service or product, with low overheads, will survive. Some blogs may blossom for a while. Media24 will survive, rewarded for innovation. Many won't.
Secondly, and it flows directly and indirectly from the first point, the internet in South Africa and around the world inevitably, will be less useful, reliable and profitable when the power starts going off more often, in more places. Oh you think it won't? In South Africa we can reasonably expect to have brownouts and blackouts for the next few decades. The reasons for this are numerous. The inability of consumers to pay for more expensive resources [coal] and processes [nuclear power stations] and the failure and cost/maintenance of legacy systems. There is also going to be disorder. South Africans who have just moved into their new homes will suddenly find they are unhappy that they can't afford electricity, and let's face it, living in a house without electricity kinda approximates living in a shack burning candles; they will start hurling molotov cocktails into Eskom offices.
While we may have some success at growing our supplies of electricity, try to match this with the rate at which electrified homes are patched to the grid each year. Hundreds of thousands of additional users, most of whom can't afford to operate these homes at ever increasing tariffs.
I know that most intelligent people think of electricity as too trivial to bother with, too simple to equate with the brilliant, dazzling, near magical advances we see in tech. Sorry, without electricity you can't charge your cellphone, you can't have your beautiful website running, you can't perform any transactions. In a world where electricity supply becomes increasingly erratic, newspapers, tangible stuff printed on paper that many people can pass around and see, and use, well, there's a place for it. When the power is off, all your fancy digital shenanigans disappear and are essentially instantly obsolete. South Africa is also a relatively poor country. The average citizen is more able to afford a newspaper than a computer and internet connection. And we're - globally - certainly moving in a direction of widespread impoverishment. So do the math, and feel free to add the SEACOM cable in, or not. The result is going to be the same.
 clipped from www.techcentral.co.za
Hartley says The Times, which is the daily sister paper to the Sunday Times – both newspapers are owned by JSE-listed media group Avusa – has already stopped thinking about itself as a newspaper. Instead, it is a producer of content It’s about the social exchangeability of that news.
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Nic Dawes
Postscript: From Duncan's article I notice there is not much emphasis on linking content to a brand, and brand relevance, and brand loyalty. Some from Mr. Dawes. There is also no mention of that most vital aspect of content which is making it LOCAL or HYPER-LOCAL. Hyperlocal content means, by definition, it's unique and targeted. A lot of what I find in newspapers and on the web is the same thing from the same sources [SAPA/AP/REUTERS etc]. On many occasions I've seen exactly the same picture on 3 different newspaper frontpages, and a few times exactly the same headline. And then all this repeated online [6 versions of the same thing in local media?] What does that tell you? The editors and journalists aren't working hard enough to create fresh content, and in addition, some are going to have to fall by the wayside. Because if you have 3 or 4 newspapers sporting the same headline, you're only going to read one at the end of the day. Bye bye.
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