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Major drum roll from the guys at Amazon.com for their announcement that “Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books (eBooks) than hardcover books.” The group went on to claim that for every 100 hardcover books sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books.

The statistics given out by the giant online retailer don’t look quite so amazing when put in proper context. In fact, quite a different story emerges that indicates the traditional publishing business is unprepared to embrace the new dynamics eBooks bring to the market.

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Broadly speaking, consumers find the online experience disappointing – embarrassingly so, according to Andy Budd, a founding partner and MD of UK-based user experience agency Clearleft. In fact, we only take the treatment we receive online as we do because we have come to expect so little, says Budd, who’ll be a speaker at the Tech4Africa conference being held in Johannesburg, 12-13 August 2010.

Just think about the time and money most companies spend on crafting the user experience of a retailer or a hotel and match that with the time and money being spent on crafting the online user experience (UX). It doesn’t quite add up, does it?

Websites often continue to be driven by technological capability rather than by a design solution, and this needs to change, Budd believes, as more and more consumers make more and more of their purchasing decisions online.

If consumers actually enjoyed using a website, they might actually come back more often – that would be money well spent! Improved user experience design also offers companies a source of opportunity in terms of differentiating themselves from their competitors and in how they approach and build customer relationships. It can turn redefine also-rans into cool, user-centric brands.

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A move by Rupert Murdoch to stash the content of his global media empire behind a paywall, and the rather unseemly rush with which any number of publishers desperate for new revenue sources followed him, serves as but another indication that all is not well in the world of media.

There have always been publishers who, with varying levels of success, have charged for their content. They tend to be specialist products, or offer high powered financial content like the FT.com or the Wall Street Journal does, but the commoditisation of news and the strategic decision by independent online publishers to embrace and publish high quality opinion and analysis (something newspapers have claimed will be their saving grace) have meant that most content stayed free.

The debate has now spilled over to South Africa since Avusa, publisher of the Sunday Times, The Times, Sowetan, Sunday World plus regional titles such as The Herald, Daily Dispatch and others, announced its intention to introduce paywalls on certain of its content properties.

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The 2010 FIFA World Cup threw up some formidable obstacles for editor Andrew Trench and his team at East London daily, the Daily Dispatch (owned by Avusa Media).
Port Elizabeth, whose stadium played host to a number of world cup games, rests on the edge of the newspaper’s circulation footprint, and is also the home of rival The Herald (also published by Avusa). Residents of East London felt a keen sense of disappointment after having had to witness Buffalo City Municipality’s flopped attempts to try and lure a world cup team to use the city as a base says, says Trench.

Trench decided his city needed to capture some “gees”, and that his paper and his community needed to find a way of tapping into positive mood around the world cup enjoyed by most South Africans.

In an editorial to readers, Trench outlined his editorial vision for his paper during the cup. “Readers who haven’t been living on Mars the last couple of weeks will have noticed an unusually patriotic tone to the Dispatch in our coverage, columns and commentary around the world cup,” Trench wrote on his blog. “This is entirely deliberate I must confess. I have been curious to see how readers respond to such an approach.”

Trench is the first to admit that it “takes a lot for journalists to put their natural cynicism to one side and to wave a flag for their country and not all my colleagues are entirely comfortable with this.”

While some in the media may take issue with Trench’s stance strategically, it does make a lot of sense, as Trench takes time to explain below. He also explains why the world cup should serve as a wake-up call for South African media in finding new relevance and hope in the communities it serves.

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In Durban, The Mercury’s editor Angela Quintal grabbed the 2010 FIFA World Cup as an opportunity for some creative thinking and innovation at her paper. Quintal decided to use the event to show the market (and her readers) that “as a newspaper The Mercury was not the conservative business read of old and could lead the way in terms of a fresh and different approach.”

She did this quite brilliantly through a series of ‘twinning’ projects in conjunction with newspapers from spanning from Lagos to Seoul. Essentially, Quintal forced her newspaper to embrace the globalised nature of news and media, and then took it one step further, integrating it into the print experience.

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The 2010 FIFA World Cup has been the biggest South African news story so far this year. The tournament dominated media coverage over several months, both in the build-up to and during the actual event. Newspapers sat between a rock and a hard place during the world cup, as television ruled with its live broadcasts and online was first with live commentary, opinion and blow-by blow recounts.

In this country, online news doesn’t do a lot of investigative journalism – it’s the obvious niche if you are a newspaper man defending your circulation from online’s straight-up reporting and opinion. National weekly Mail & Guardian took this approach, one that editor Nic Dawes describes as dancing SA’s complicated rhythm and which combined vigorous investigation with some flag-waving, nation-building and partying. Others, such as KwaZulu-Natal’s The Mercury, grabbed the opportunity to think outside the box and re-engage with visual journalism.

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The latest anti-BP ‘ad’ to go viral comes from the guys at www.UnFuckTheGulf.com. Some of it is pretty funny. But four fucking minutes of people going fuck you gets fucking lame 40 seconds in.

The last time fuck was a ‘dangerous’ word was on the playground in kindergarden. Nothing novel about it. Anger doesn’t come packaged in neatly produced videos. I’m not sure why we pretend it does? Fuck BP. Yeah. You had me at “Birds are fucked, fish are fucked, sea turtles are fucked…What the Fuck…”

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Last week CNN fired one of its senior editors, Octavia Nasr, after she paid her respects in a tweet following the death of a controversial Lebanese Shia cleric.

The cleric in question, Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, has been associated with Hezbollah, which is deemed a terrorist organisation by most Western governments.

The tweet that cost Nasr her job read “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.. #Lebanon.”

She would later attempt to clarify and contextualise her tweet in a blog post, but Atlanta would have none of it.

The debate sparked by CNN’s firing of Nasr can be found all over the web with some big-name journalists venturing an opinion. Lucky for them, they don’t work for CNN. Many journalism schools still don’t encourage students to form or express opinions. It’s because journalists need to be objective, not takes sides, thus offering the complete story to readers so they can form their own opinion rather than have yours crammed down their throat.

Of course that is still how many view journalism, readers especially, and journalists have not done enough to update these views on our profession. Journalists often establish a personal voice in their writing. It breaks the monotony of blandness in news reporting that the information age is rendering pointless.

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