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Moegsien Williams Q&A: The New Age business model, the business breakfasts and Helen Zille

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Is The New Age the Great Evil or just another newspaper trying to get off the ground?

Ever since it launched two years ago, controversy has swirled around the paper because its main shareholders – the Gupta family – are close associates with the family of our controversial president, Jacob Zuma.

The paper has always said its intention is to tell the good-news stories of South Africa and give the government credit where it’s due but not to be the mouthpiece of the ruling party.

But its detractors – especially since the latest controversy around parastatal funding for its SABC business breakfasts – say the paper is nothing more than another Citizen of the infamous Info scandal of the 1970s.

Grubstreet interviewed The New Age’s editor, Moegsien Williams, last week to find out more about how The New Age operates, its emerging business model and what kind of paper he wants it to be.

Data mapping puts paid to marketing in the dark

by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) I went to a very interesting presentation of research last week by World Wide Worx’s Arthur Goldstuck and the MapIT MD, Etienne Louw, into data mapping and how many SA companies are doing it and for what reasons (mostly vehicle tracking).

So it was slightly out of my field of coverage but Arthur’s research is always interesting so off I went.

It struck me during the presentation that there is the germ of something very interesting going on in marketing today – and more companies should be using it.

Just as millions of online publishers throughout the world – like me – can study Google analytics (in real time, nog al) and see exactly how many people are hitting one’s site, which pages they are reading, what devices they are using and where they are coming from (e.g. Twitter or Facebook or Google searches), so can marketers, media planners and advertisers use digital mapping to analyse exactly how many people – and of which LSM profiles – are seeing their ads in print campaigns.

Louw told us (munching breakfast with a crew of amiable geeks in a function room at the Nellie in Cape Town) that MapIT – which is owned by Times Media Group and TomTom – did an analysis recently for a company of an ad campaign in a knock-and-drop newspaper. What MapIT did was overlay the newspaper’s delivery area with census and LSM stats (as I understood it).

Gill Moodie talks to Mondli Makhanya on life after the Sunday Times

by Gill Moodie @GrubstreetSA Mondli Makhanya has resigned from Times Media Group (TMG) – previously known as Avusa – to write a book.

The former Sunday Times and Mail & Guardian editor resigned as editor-in-chief of the company’s newspapers – a position he took up in 2010 – at the end of December, a fact that flew under the radar screen amid the festive season.

Also little known is that the editorship of the TMG-owned Sunday World is vacant after Wally Mbhele left to start his own consultancy late last year while the grapevine is alive with speculation on who will net the editorship of Business Day – which is half owned by TMG – after Peter Bruce was appointed BDFM publisher in September last year.

Makhanya told Grubstreet this week that industry rumours that he may be talking to consortia interested in buying Independent Newspapers is untrue.