You might have heard British journalist Neal Collins on Radio 702 or Cape Talk during the Soccer World Cup or read his stories in the Independent’s newspapers such as The Mercury.The veteran sports writer of top UK papers such as the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard has South African roots – growing up in Centurion and starting his career at SA newspapers – which is how he ended up freelancing more for South African media organisations while covering the World Cup rather than those back at home. Having covered many World Cups and Olympics, Collins tells how South Africa shaped up for the media mob. (The vid below is Neal on his recently published novel, “A Game Apart”, set on the football fields of apartheid South Africa and click here to go his blog.)

GILL MOODIE: You’ve covered World Cups before this – in France in 1998 and Germany in 2001 – so how did this one in SA rate generally? Was it harder or easier to cover? Was it more fun?
NEAL COLLINS: I think the problem was that the British and European journalists were generally taken out of their safety zones… We’ve had rugby and cricket world cups here and many (UK) journalist came out to cover them. But rugby and cricket writers tend to be more middle-class, I guess, and the sport they’re covering is more upmarket and they don’t often have to go to the townships… It struck me that the football writers would have preferred to have been in Germany or France because it’s easier, you move around better, you wouldn’t ever have to confront a shanty town on the side of the road or a taxi driver who doesn’t really know where’s he’s going… But by and large, talking to the English journalists and fans who came here, I think they really enjoyed it… All the way through this (tournament) it was about perceptions of Africa – not just South Africa – and a feverish belief that it would be a crap World Cup and chaotic. I think it turned around and there’s no question that people recognised that South Africa was capable (of hosting a football World Cup).

MOODIE: What was the access to teams and coaches like?
COLLINS: It was horrendous. I don’t think anyone can accuse Fifa of going soft on security. The Leriba Lodge and the Irene Lodge – where the Italians and Americans were staying – were completely closed down with helicopters over them and security guards. You couldn’t even get into the hotels. At other World Cups, the security was less Draconian and you could contact the teams. A couple of times the Argentineans were out in Menlyn Shopping Centre (in Pretoria) and a couple of people saw (Wayne) Rooney out in Kempton Park early on in the competition and got his signature. Although we had a couple of open days (at which the public could watch a team train) – and I went along to the Dutch and Portuguese open days – you saw mounted police and people with machine guns protecting them. It was a bit heavy. You wouldn’t get that in England, I don’t think.

MOODIE: So you found that with the English team too – even though you must have had lot of contacts there?
COLLINS: Of course. You couldn’t get near them but I think they (the team) did that themselves… The lack of access (to teams in general) is definitely one of my big complaints and hopefully in Brazil (at the next World Cup), they will get it right and make sure that the fans will get to see their idols and not just at matches but in training… Click here to read the rest of the interview at journalism.co.za.

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What the revamped website looks like.

Well, blow me down but Business Day has a new-look website — and very pleasing it is too! It often seems to me that Business Day and BDFM in general is treated as the poor step-sister in the Avusa family (BDFM is a joint venture, which means it is owned jointly by Avusa and Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times of London).

So while much attention is lavished on Avusa’s Times Live, Business Day’s website seems to have trundled along in a very low-key fashion for many years. Quite frankly, I find this very odd as Business Day actually has something unique that users out there might well be prepared to pay for: It is the country’s premier business publication and consistently turns out thoughtful analysis and comment on SA’s business and political worlds by experienced writers such as Tim Cohen, Eusebius McKaiser, Dave Mars and Hilary Joffe.

Giving their unique content away for free has always struck me as even odder as it must be culling the circulation of the print publication.  (And, in fact, editor Peter Bruce has said he suspects as much but then why would you listen to him — he’s only the editor.)

But back to the revamped website: it’s more cleanly designed with more white space, bigger font sizes, more thumbnails in colour — generally more lively but also more professional looking. There’s no irritating bells and whistles: the new design gets the job done, which is to convey information to busy businesspeople. It is also much easier to access the blog zone.   Click here to read a blog post by Business Day’s Des Latham on the recent changes.

The general gist of the thinking behind the changes — and Peter Bruce was involved in the redesign — is that the paper’s copy will no longer be fed arbitrarily onto the site but that there will  be more thought given to what should be flagged and how things should be weighted in order to make it more user-friendly. It sounds like someone’s actually being paid to be an online editor. That’s excellent news and well overdue.

The only criticism I have is that it seems slow but I’m sure that’s just the usual bugs and gremlins that come with a redesign and it will all be sorted out soon. Click here to go to the new-look Business Day.

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Sam Rogers of e.tv recently won the top prize at this year’s CNN MultiChoice African Journalist 2010 Awards for her 36-minute documentary (have a look at the excerpt below) on Tanzania’s albino people, who face discrimination every day and are victims in a growing trade in albino body parts. An edited version of Rogers’ doccie, called “Curse of the Nobody People” was shown on e.tv’s Third Degree while the station is still looking for international broadcasters for it. I spoke to Rogers about the making of the film.

GILL MOODIE: So how did this story come about?
SAM ROGERS: You know, I’d been seeing newspapers articles about it being buried on page six or eight of The Star and I started Googling it and reading other articles about it in Tanzanian and Ugandan newspapers. The more I researched, the more I saw it as a story that was getting out of control. I didn’t think it should be buried on the back pages or middle pages. I really thought it was a story that would translate very well into film or a documentary. So I started researching and made contact with journalists and fixers in Tanzania and the story just grew.

MOODIE: Why did you think it would translate well into film?
ROGERS: Well, we’re a crime and investigation unit which falls under “factuals”, which is a new division at e.tv… There are three divisions that fall under factuals: there’s us (based in Johannesburg) and then there’s a natural history unit based in Cape Town and there’s a history and biographies unit also based in Cape Town… The idea behind what we (in our unit) do is to make African crime stories for international broadcast. This story was initially for the international market – anyone who would buy it really. And I thought it’s got all the aspects: it’s a shocking story, visually it could be quite strong, it’s an unusual story.

MOODIE: So how much preparation was there in South Africa before you went off to Tanzania (in November 2008) to shoot.
ROGERS: I must have spent about a month and half on research and speaking to people, to see who would be on board (when we got there) and then just working out the logistics. We had to shoot in Dar es Salaam and then get ourselves with an enormous amount of equipment to a place called Mwanza, which is a small town on Lake Victoria (where most of the murders and attacks on albinos have occurred in Tanzania). And once we got there, we were hoping that everything would run smoothly. It’s difficult to shoot in the little villages because you have to spend an hour and a half having tea with every headman discussing what you want to do and who you are. That’s a really slow process so we shot for about two and a half weeks there.

MOODIE: You must have really packed it in. To get 36 minutes of edited video, you must have filmed a hell of a lot more.
ROGERS: Ja, we were exhausted. It was a very, very intense shoot – very hot, very humid. The camera doesn’t like that kind of intense heat and also the light was very harsh… We had to cut from at least 11 o’clock in the day till three o’clock, till the light softened so we could shoot it beautifully because we had to shoot it beautifully. It lent itself to that.

MOODIE: Especially when you guys got to Mwanza. There were some very beautiful images such as a marabou stork on a pole near the lake and a man in a fez ironing clothes with an old-fashioned hot iron in the street next to a cast-iron gate.
ROGERS: Mwanza seemed to be in a time warp. Things have not moved on there. There are old railway buildings, railways lines that don’t work anymore. It felt like old fashioned, pre-colonial Africa, I thought… Click here to read the rest of the interview with Sam at journalism.co.za

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Notice anything about today’s front pages of The Star, Cape Times and The Mercury? They all played last night’s crucial Bafana World Cup game exactly the same!

I know the papers’ owner, Independent Newspapers, has created a centralised subbing operation in order to contain costs in these straightened times but, bloody hell, where is the personality of the various editors and the papers on this hugely important story?  Nowhere — it looks to me like the subs were left to deal with it.

I presume, unlike most editors in SA who stayed at the office last night to watch the big game and decide on the front page afterwards, the eds of The Star (which is based in Joburg), Cape Times (of Cape Town) and the Durban-based Mercury went home. Interestingly, the Independent-owned Pretoria News seems to have bucked the trend and done its own thing.

I truly hope the editors didn’t hand it over to someone else but it does look that way.

I’d welcome it if any of the above eds told me I’m wrong as I think this extremely uncool.    Call me old fashioned but this is all part of the thrill of journalism: Being in the newsroom to watch the big national event unfolding on TV,  on the wires and being covered by your own reporters and deciding on deadline how to play the story. I think the readers have been let down too as their papers — or what they perceive as their papers — have not put their own thought into this and stamped their own mark on the event.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, new information came to light about how this happened at the Indy. Click here to read and to see how other SA papers played the Bafana exit on their front pages.

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Greg in front of "Transfer", an oil and charcoal on canvas, one of the works in his latest exhibition.

Please excuse the shameless promotion of my mate, artist Greg Schultz, but I went to the opening of his new exhibition last night and it was truly fabulous. Big works which took over the whole of the Ann Bryant Art Gallery in East London.

Greg lives on the Kwelera River in the Eastern Cape and it drives his art in every way, with his love of the land and water and wind flowing through all his wonderful paintings.

His latest exhibition, called “Traces”, features twelve very large  – 2.5m x 1.6m – oil and mixed-media paintings (and an animated film projection). They are huge expanses of intense detail, alive with colour and movement.

(The exhibition runs at the Ann Bryant Gallery in East London’s CBD till  July 7th.)

Greg with the blank canvasses that became "Traces".

Born and raised in East London, Greg was head of department of art and design at the Buffalo City College before becoming a full-time artist in 2007.

He holds regular exhibitions at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and his work has found its way into prestigious collection around the country.

He is becoming one of South Africa’s premier landscape painters and if I had the bucks, I’d acquire one for sure.

But don’t mind my ramblings, rather feast your eyes on the works below that are in the the latest exhibition (and click here to go to Greg’s website):

ABOVE: “Moon Path” was created out of oil, charcoal, wax, paper, gold and silver leaf, fire and water. Schultz started using fire and water as a medium in 2005 by which he sets painting alight and controls it with water. To see how this works, click here and start up the video entitled “Greg Schultz – Burn”.

"Pulse", an oil and charcoal work.

This work, called "One Hundred and Ninety Tins – Creative Cycle Part III", was made from oil, glue, graphite and 190 tuna tins on canvas and supawood.

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The Internet, we are told, is the great publishing leveller because it allows small operators to compete with the big media houses as the online environment frees them up of prohibitive printing and distribution costs.
And so the likes of Mashable and Perez Hilton have become global brands while in South Africa we have a clutch of very interesting independent outfits such as Branko Brkic’s The Daily Maverick, Duncan McLeod’s TechCentral, Alec Hogg’s Moneyweb, Matthew Buckland’s Memeburn, and Bizcommunity that all hold their own against the big boys such as Media24 and IOL in the online environment.

That savvy one-man bandits can achieve this is the stuff of fairy tales and those that were ahead of the curve such as Moneyweb (founded in 1997) and Bizcommunity (founded in 1999 by André Rademan and Ken van Ginkel) are now thoroughly viable businesses that punch way above their weights in the SA media landscape.

Not actually that easy

Now here’s the cautionary bit so pay attention: It’s not actually that easy.

First up, the skills barrier is high – creating and presenting good content is as labour-intensive online as it is in print and it takes most people many years toiling away in a conventional newsroom to gather the experience to do so.

Next, even if you know how to make copy sing and you can keep your costs down by working from a hoekie at home, the technology barrier is enormous. As a lone blogger myself, I can tell you right off that, unless you were once a ZX Spectrum geek, you will need the help of a buddy who can hack code, wrestle with plugins and explain SEO in simple language – even if you’re using the user-friendly free blogging platform WordPress.

Then, I have also discovered somewhat unhappily:

1. The exhilaration of being a lone ranger wears off round about six to eight months and fatigue sets in – feeding that beast can become tiresome.
2. The web is absolutely unforgiving: the deadline is now, all the time. Take a week or two off and your users will desert you in droves.
3. You can market your website for free through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter – but there is a finesse to this. The punters out these will “unfriend” you in a heartbeat if they suspect you are not there to interact meaningfully but just to sell yourself.
4. It is nigh impossible to make money unless you are very targeted, but even so it’s not easy to collect sufficient demographic information and selling advertising or sponsorship is a skill in itself… TO CONTINUE READING THIS COLUMN AND AN INTERVIEW WITH THE DAILY MAVERICK PUBLISHER BRANKO BRKIC, CLICK HERE TO GO TO BIZCOMMUNITY.

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The Poms don’t really like to leave home, which is why you’ll find them seeking out home comforts such as bacon and eggs in exotic climes the world over. And where the Brits go, their newspapers are sure to follow.

And so it is with the 2010 Fifa World Cup, which starts in just over two weeks’ time.

Britain is, after all, a nation that loves to read newspapers. It has no less than 10 national newspapers, which is disproportionally high for a population of 61-million people.

With the legions of British footy fans will come at least one of their newspapers, the Daily Mirror tabloid, which boasts 1.2 million average daily sales in the UK. It will be printed daily in South Africa throughout the tournament and local media house Avusa had been contracted by the Mirror Group to print and distribute the paper.

I spoke to the London-based Allan Rogerson, the pre-press director of Mirror Group Newspapers, and Mark White, the overseas circulation manager (now that gives you an indication of the scale of the paper’s operation!) about the logistics of the operation:

Gill Moodie: Are you guys the only British paper printing in SA during the world cup??

Mark White: As far as we’re aware there’s no other title that’s doing it on the scale that we are and for the duration that we are. Obviously, others are looking at digital print, which is (a case of) pressing a button and five copies get printed out that go to the TV stations or the journalists and that’s it. Nobody is going to the streets, to the hotels or the fan villages, etc, which is what we’re planning to do through (distributors) Allied and Avusa.

Gill Moodie: Where will it be printed?

Allan Rogerson: Avusa Media will be subcontracting some of the printing (to Caxton) as they do themselves (for some of their own publications). We’re trying to be as flexible as possible. We’re still not sure even at this late stage where all our fans are going to be and just how popular the paper’s going be – whether it’s the fans or (British) people that are already over there… We made an arrangement with Avusa that we can print at virtually any print site around South Africa… And we will be printing an amount at those print sites depending on where our fans are and where we can sell… TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY COLUMN AT BIZCOMMUNITY.

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Oops. Wrong end.

I’m happy to say I’m now World Cup befok, staring down the bright yellow orb of my newly-acquired vuvuzela. I can’t wait for the upwelling of national pride, the festivities and the heart-stopping penalty shoot-outs. And, media houses, take note, though I normally have absolutely no interest in soccer or sport in general, I’m ready to start consuming stories on the 2010 FIFA World Cup teams, coaches and the expectations of the various participating nations.
Now if only I could lay my hands on some coverage.

Where is it all? Hidden on the sports pages of my daily newspaper? I seldom go there but, quite frankly, I would have expected shameless reams of world cup sports copy on the news and features pages by now. There is, after all, only 22 days to go.

Nevertheless, preparations by media houses across the land to cover the world cup have been on the go for a while – some started the planning as much as a year ago – and many a hope has been pinned on a turn-up in advertising revenue on the back of the event, especially after marketing budgets were slashed last year amid the recession.

But as early as March this year, there were signs that the tournament might not be an early Christmas and that many local advertisers were holding back on spending during the event as they feared being lost amid all the footie clutter.

Virginia Hollis, joint MD of The MediaShop, one of South Africa’s biggest media-planning firms, says that, besides increased expenditure from official sponsors such as MTN and Coca-Cola, she hasn’t seen the expected upsurge in advertising. In the first three months of this year, there was an increase in television advertising -and also in radio – but this came off a low base because adspend was so decimated last year. Hollis expects advertising to pick up in August, when advertisers feel more confident about reaching SA audiences without having to cut through the soccer clutter… TO READ THE FULL COLUMN, “THE WORD ON GRUBSTREET”, CLICK HERE TO GO TO BIZCOMMUNITY.

* This was published first on Bizcommunity, on May 19 2010.

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Call me nostalgic but South African radio has never topped Capital Radio 604 of the 1980s. One of the very few cool things about growing up in East London, as I did at this time, is that if you patiently twiddled the dial on the AM frequency, you could listen to 604, which began life as SA’s first private radio station in 1979, broadcasting from Port St Johns in the Transkei.

It became quite literally the sound track of my youth, with its intelligent DJs, cutting-edge music and news that gave you the other side of the story of life under apartheid. But because the DJs were mostly British and they played largely US and UK music, I had always assumed that it was young white kids such as myself who tuned in religiously to the station.

Then last year I read a letter in the East London-based Daily Dispatch newspaper in which the black letter writer who grew up in the Transkei waxed lyrical about the station for the same reasons I loved it so much. It almost brought a tear to my eye and it goes to show that truly excellent radio cuts across boundaries – even racial ones in 1980s South Africa!

I mention this because I continue to be amazed that the likes of 5FM and Metro FM, our two big SABC-owned national youth stations, continue to largely define themselves along racial lines. In their choice of music and presenters, both Metro and 5FM are targeted at specific race groups, which surely becomes increasingly irrelevant with every new South African generation – especially today’s middle-class kids, who, irrespective of race, seem to dress the same, talk the same and have the same overarching worries and dreams.

But then if you are constricted by play lists, put as little money as possible into news and hire dimwits for presenters, then it’s no wonder that you get a rather narrowly defined audience – and that’s just fine by the advertisers so the money keeps rolling in. The only problem is that most SA national and regional radio is as dull as ditch water – commoditised crap, which is possibly why radio listenership is showing signs of decline.. CLICK HERE TO READ MY FULL COLUMN, “THE WORD ON GRUBSTREET”, AT BIZCOMMUNITY.

* This column appeared first at Bizcommunity.

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1. The Sunday Times is undoubtedly back in form under new editor Ray Hartley, with plenty more news to read up front. Last Sunday’s pull-together of murdered strip-club king Lolly Jackson’s shady business dealings was excellent and then Chris Barron’s obit was fascinating reading (bold headline too — “Lolly, stripped” — I like it.).  Though I did notice that the two stories put forward different murder theories — a bit of co-ordination between the insight and news departments needed there.

2. Everybody had the story about The Pill turning 50 this week. Interesting to note it was the Catholic Church that initiated it but this story from the Huffington Post caught my eye: How The Pill presented quite a pickle for JFK, what with being Catholic and all, and how the Republicans pounced on it for some political milage.

3. Down in the Eastern Cape, the Daily Dispatch had an excellent story on  Princess NomaXhosa Sigcawu (who wrote a letter to the paper) saying that she is the rightful heir to the amaXhosa throne as she is the oldest child of the senior wife of her late father, King Zwelidumile Sigcawu. The family says she cannot rule in accrodance with tradition  but the paper then in 2008, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of Tinyiko Lwandlamuni Phillia Nwamitwa-Shilubana becoming chief instead of a male cousin in Limpopo.

This all comes at a sensitive time as the princess’s nephew, King Mpendulo Sigcawu, is to be crowned king in June after the  Nhlapo Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims found that he was the legitimate king of all AmaXhosa.

Personally, I hope Sigcawu takes her case to court. This chauvinistic tradition that only men can rule is totally outdated, absurd and against our Constitution. Hell, the Brits had the same dumb-ass tradition until Elizabeth I became queen and they did alright under her.  Polygamy is a grey area in terms of discrimination against women as the women enter into those arrangements voluntarily but this is clear as day. And it’s time the male chiefs get with the programme.

And then you have to check this website out: of South Africans singing the national anthem for the “Sing It Loud, Sing It Proud” competition in honour of the World Cup. Some are very funny, some good and I’m sure it will provide many a titter or two in the next few weeks as more people enter.

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