by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) What’s eating City Press so much that its annual editorial strategy meeting last week blew up into a race row that exploded on Twitter and into the mainstream media after an extraordinary email by editor Ferial Haffajee to staff was leaked to The Media Online?
Tag archives: grubstreet
Grubstreet: Social Media Landscape 2014 study
by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) Social networking is truly on the rise in South Africa, the recent “Social Media Landscape 2014” study tells us, and the top brands of South Africa are intensifying their social-media activity.
Grubstreet: The media and Joost: “We don’t always get it right”
by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) It must surely be South Africa’s longest-running celebrity story: Joost van der Westhuizen and the great highs and lows of his extraordinary life.
Back in the news again recently with an exposé of his “healer” and news that he is fighting to stop the publication of a book by former Rapport celebrity reporter Gavin Prins about his life, Van der Westhuizen has fascinated the South African public for more than decade – and certainly helped the sales of magazines such as Huisgenoot and Afrikaans papers such as Rapport.
Grubstreet: Getaway — we won’t bamboozle you like Google
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) RamsayMedia’s Getaway is updating its ethos to reflect a more sophisticated view of travel among the South Africa’s growing middle class – a move that the magazine’s editor, Cameron Ewart-Smith, describes as “a fundamental shift in the very fabric of our magazine”.
This also means that the iconic outdoor adventurer’s magazine that was launched in 1989 has been redesigned. You’ll see the changes in the October 2013 edition that is already available in store. They include a glossy, more sophisticated cover, bolder use of typography and pictures, more graphics and a brighter palette of colours.
Ewart-Smith told Grubstreet last week: “(The change) was borne out of looking at South African travellers and realising there is a much more diverse community of travellers than waspy, (national) park-going traditional Getaway readers.
Grubstreet: The future of broadcasting is authenticity – Given Mkhari
by Gill Moodie. Broadcasting from Polokwane in the far north of the country, Capricorn FM is a model for how a radio station can succeed in a secondary economy.
Latest newspaper circulation figures. Yowzer!
There’s blood on the floor in the most recent set of print sales figures – for the second quarter (Q2) of this year that were released this week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations of SA (ABC) – but there are also titles fighting for their lives, street by street, and even winning back a tiny bit of territory.
There are a few newspapers out there that are actually managing to arrest circulation decline – and not just in the vernacular market.
This tells us that it is possible in newspapers today to be interesting and have meaning to people but you have to think very deeply about how to be relevant and you have to work very hard and be very patient about getting there, street by street, block by block.
This is not a traditional battle on open terrain but difficult, complicated urban warfare.
Saarf/NAB fight explained: It’s about who owns the data
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Understanding how the South African Audience Research Foundation (Saarf) puts together its research is difficult enough so if you’ve been scratching your head lately over the battle between the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Saarf, then you are not alone.
The NAB – which represents the radio and television media owners – resigned recently from the Saarf board (as of the start of next year), leaving many in media wondering what this means for the future.
Power FM: Who says you need a target market based on demographics?
by Gill Moodie. Power FM is set to shake up the already contested radio market in Gauteng not only in the battle for listeners but also in its approach to its target market.
eNCA.com – Late to the party but streetwise
TV and online seem to be such a happy fit so it has always perplexed me that eNews Channel Africa – or eNCA (previously eNews) – went for so long without a proper website. In fact, eNCA only launched its site – under GM Tim Spira – in April this year.
But even with eNCA still in the process of establishing its brand (the change was necessitated by the launch of a UK channel on the Sky pay-TV platform in August last year), the site’s numbers are exceeding its own expectations: at more than 270 000 domestic users in May, which was its first full month of in existence.
Grubstreet spoke to Spira last week to find out more about why it took so long for eNCA to establish an online presence and what mistakes they hope to avoid by coming to the party so late.
Nic Dawes on the biggest challenges of being the M&G editor
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes is off to India in September, when he will take up one of the top positions at the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, it was announced recently. In this second part of an interview, Grubstreet talks to Dawes about change in the M&G newsroom, his legacy to the paper and the press’ recent battles with the ruling party.
Grubstreet: Do you think the converged newsroom – how you’ve integrated print and online – is the main mark that you’re leaving on the M&G?
Nic Dawes: I certainly think it’s probably the most obvious thing that I’ve tried to do here – to bring some of those (online and social-media) practices into our newsroom, to open us up so that the audience is not so much the audience anymore but participants in what we do.
You have to be really very sanguine and welcome the changes that are going on in our industry because I think they genuinely make us better journalists and make us produce better news products.
I think the other thing is the way we’ve tried to build capacity inside the paper, to keep on doing more thorough public-interest journalism without having new sources of commercial funding. So there’s AmaBhungane (non-profit investigative centre) and the Eugene Saldanha fellowship – these sorts of things, which do substantially broaden the base of what we do and also makes a contribution that goes beyond the M&G in terms of training journalists from other papers and from other countries in terms of advocacy.
And maybe the final thing is opening up a bit more to Africa – trying to bring more Africa coverage into the paper and into the website.