A move by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) to regulate the highly lucrative business of sports broadcasting rights came closer to policy last week as the deadline for submission on Icasa’s “preliminary findings and conclusions” closed on Friday.

The arena for this battle – and don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t a battle – has been Icasa and though the submissions to the regulator from the public and stakeholders are as dry as toast, blood pressure is up on all sides. The money is big and the stakes are high.

On the one hand, there is the government’s determination not to allow pay-TV operations to acquire exclusive rights to broadcast national sporting events that all South Africans should be able to watch and enjoy – and, crucially, for children on all backgrounds to be inspired to grow up to be national sporting heroes.

There are also the national sports bodies, which rely on money from broadcast rights for an average 60% of their revenue. Internationally, sports bodies’ revenue comes from – in descending order of importance – broadcasting rights, sponsorships, ticket sales, merchandising and government subsidies and grants, according to Amanda Armstrong, a director and law specialist in telecommunications and broadcasting at Werksmans Attorneys. In South Africa, the government’s contribution was less than 1% of the annual revenue of most sports bodies in 2008.

There are the free-to-air channels, e.tv and the SABC, for which there are obvious commercial gains – both in terms of audience and advertising – if they can get the first option to bid without competition from pay-TV operations for more live sport. SABC and e.tv say – a tad sanctimoniously – in their Icasa submissions that the “… the broadcast of key sporting events on pay-TV has a negative impact on the participation of many South Africans in sport and could undermine the transformation in sport”. But free-to-air channels can often struggle to find air space to broadcast live events amid their local content programming. It’s worth noting, for instance, that the tripartite agreement between the PSL, SuperSport and the SABC (struck after SuperSport snapped up the exclusive rights in 2007 for the PSL from SABC), the public broadcaster was in fact required to broadcast more games than it did in the previous season when it held all the PSL rights.

The last players in this drama are the pay-TV operators such as DStv’s SuperSport as well as the new guys on the block, ODM and Super 5 Media, which are expected to launch this year. SuperSport, which coughed up about R2bn for the exclusive broadcast rights of PSL soccer games over five years, is hugely concerned about the current Icasa review. Chiefly, the problem is that there’s no point is spending large sums of money if you can’t get them exclusively… TO READ THE FULL COLUMN, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MONEYWEB.

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Earlier this week I reported on Moneyweb how SA magazines are feeling the pinch of the recession with the latest AdEX/Nielsen’s numbers showing adspend in those titles from 2008 to 2009.
Well, the picture ain’t pretty when it comes to newspapers either. If you look at the chart below (Also AdEx/Nielsens) you can see what I mean. Treat the numbers with some caution because they don’t take into account discounting and other things, but this is useful as an apples versus apples comparison to at least show a broader trend.
You can easily see who the winners have been during the recession (some surprises in weekend business titles). The Independent on Saturday’s Personal Finance section appears to have performed strongly. We also see the Sunday Times up well, according to this measure, although Business Times took a major hit. The relatively new kid on the block, The Times, also shows strong growth despite the odds. The Daily Voice is another standout and Business Day Surveys appears to be cooking.
Anyway, it makes for some interesting reading. Be keen to hear your insights on these numbers. Give the chart a few seconds to load. There are a lot of titles here.

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There’s a few movers and shakers out there moving and shaking worthy of a wee blog post.

First up, Lisa MacLeod, who was the chief sub and managing editor of Business Day a few years back, has been made managing editor of the Financial Times in London. WHICH IS HUGE!!! And she’s only in her 30s so you can see how good Lisa is to rise that high at the FT,  one of the most respected papers in the world.

I worked for Lisa at Business Day in the 90s and she was a superb manager and one of the most organised – and genuinely nice – people I’ve come across in journalism. She also happens to come from Grubstreet’s town, East London, so don’t let any tell you that this is a plekkie of skates and surfers. Lisa has been working at the FT for quite a few years.

And then another East Londoner (though to be fair he was only born here and I think he might deny it)  is up to interesting things. Matthew Buckland is leaving 24.com’s innovation unit,  20FourLabs, to do his own thing. This includes a digital agency and consultancy based in Cape Town and Joburg and launching a new website, Memeburn, — which Matthew describes as “a Mashable/Techcrunch for emerging market tech“.

So exciting for stuff!  We could do with a bit more spunk in SA’s online news world – and Grubstreet is contributing to Memeburn so watch this space!

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Here’s some excellent news for the freelance hacks out there — and also for salaried journalists too! Safrea, the association of freelance journalists, editors, designers and copywriters, signed an alliance agreement with the Uasa union on Friday.

Uasa is a well organised, non-politically aligned union with about 75 000 members and the deal entitles Safrea members (and I’m pleased to say I’m one)  to join the union at R64 a month, which will get them access to the union’s legal and labour-related services and discounts on products such as pensions, medical aid, insurance, car and home loans.

Clive Lotter, Safrea’s chairman, says the union has its own legal department led by an in-house advocate and a 24-hour legal hotline. The legal department will review standard freelance contracts and will be able to help freelance journalists in disputes to a certain extent.

From left, Safrea chairman Clive Lotter, UASA chief operating officer Leon Olivier and UASA CEO Koos Oosthuizen putting pen to paper on Friday in Johannesburg.

The key thing, says Lotter, is that the alliance will help freelancers to become more professional – and move out the “working on a handshake” territory – and also create the opportunity for freelance and salaried journalists to join forces. As this is an alliance between Uasa and Safrea – and not an amalgamation – it creates an avenue whereby fulltime hacks will be able to join the union through bodies such as ProJourn and Sanef.

“This is the first step in organising journalists into a force which can defend its own interests,” says Lotter.

Uasa, which is affiliated to the Fedusa federation, has access to Parliament and to Nedlac. This is the first time that Uasa has entered into such an alliance.

Grubstreet thinks this is a hugely positive move. There is more and more demand for freelancing – especially since media organisation cut staff in the recession but are still in need of content – but rates still seem to vary largey R1-R2 a word, which is not great. Many organisation are extremely tardy in paying for work done or indulge in the dirty tricks department such as holding onto copy (with no intention of using it) to keep it out of the hands of rivals.

Well done Clive and all the committee members at Safrea!

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Here’s something new on Grubstreet: a real-time media jobs barometer of the job ads at the Biz Community website.

Biz Community is definitely the premier spot for media and advertising jobs and I check in on it quite regularly to see what’s going in the market.

If you have a look at today’s data visualisation of the ads, you will see how many jobs there are going in the advertising industry.  Next up is jobs in marketing and then digital and design pretty much in a dead heat.

For the hacks out there, I’m sorry to say there’s hardly any newspaper jobs going so hang on to the one you’ve got. Let’s not forget that Media24 is doing yet another round retrenchments and, in my view, most newspapers will keep their staff compliments down for quite sometime to come even as ad revenue begins to pick up. Times are tough and lean is mean, people!

The bar graph and pie chart will change in real-time so keep checking in on it to get a sense of what’s up on the mean streets.

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As publishers agonise over whether to put up paywalls on their websites, one South African newspaper – The Witness in Pietermaritzburg – has quietly but decisively locked down its online content.

Existing print subscribers have passwords to access the full online offering and generic content, such as national politics is still free but the message is clear: If you want the unique content produced by the paper’s reporters covering KwaZulu-Natal, then you must pay. It began in November last year and it is a bold move,  not least because you must cough up R283 over three months for access  – just under R100 a month.

So is this a defensive move, designed to protect the paper’s print circulation or part of a long-term strategy?

The print circulation of The Witness – which is 50%-owned by Media24 – is certainly under pressure from Independent Newspapers’ The Mercury, which under new editor Angela Quintal is lifting its game after years of inertia and breaking some good stories.  The last available ABC sales figures (for the third quarter of 2009) for The Witness were 20 771 daily sales, which is rather low for a regional paper with long-standing roots in a community.

The paper’s deputy editor, Yves Vanderhaeghen, who also oversees the online operation, says the paper’s paid-content move had limited intentions and targets  – which have been achieved after three months. He won’t say how many subscribers have been signed up but estimates the conversion of browsers to paid-content users to be less than the generally accepted industry standard of one in ten.  But then The Witness was not looking to make money out of the move, says Vanderhaeghen, but rather to generate sufficient money to bolster its small web operation.

Even so, the decision was not taken lightly, and Vanderhaeghen wrote an extensive piece in the paper explaining the move.

“It was a delicate step,” he says. “We didn’t want to antagonise anyone particularly and we had some interesting reactions. There were a few people who reacted by saying ‘I can just get my news from IOL’.  But that’s fine as we’re not in competition with them.”… TO READ MY FULL COLUMN AT MONEYWEB, CLICK HERE.

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The iPad v Kindle battle shaking up global media and publishing is about to send some waves to South Africa’s shores. Experts say 2010 will be the year the e-book reader comes of age and at the moment there are only two main players in the ring: Apple’s iPad tablet computing device with web, multimedia, gaming and e-book functionality and the less functional but more established e-book reader from Amazon, the Kindle.

The battle between these two global giants is redefining the rules of publishing and content distribution and the big players in South Africa are watching the fray with an eye for opportunity. Already there are unconfirmed rumours that one major South African media house is talking to Amazon’s Kindle division and speculation that another is toying with developing its own e-reader device.

What the key players will say, however, is that they are interested in the market that is emerging on the back of this technology. And well they should be. Mobile phones have yet to come of age as a viable platform for media and publishing houses – even in South Africa where cellphone technology is pretty much ubiquitous at every level of the population.

The Amazon/Apple battle is fascinating not only because it involves two celebrity companies but because a new business model is emerging that could be a fundamental game-changer for publishers and creators of content. The new rules of the game for media houses could lead to dramatically higher margins as distribution and production costs plummet with content pushed through the ether on to mobile devices such as the Kindle and the iPad.

But with this revolution comes new gatekeepers demanding a charge for these mobile eyeballs. Amazon was taking 70% of revenue of book sales done through the Kindle until Apple came along with the iPad. After a recent face-off with book publisher MacMillan, Amazon has decreased its slice of the pie to 30% on MacMillan’s book sales.

But should South Africa’s print media be jumping on to the bandwagon when the take-up in this country will be quite slow? On the one hand these devices are reasonably pricey and there’s not just a wealth barrier. Many older people may not be keen to learn new tricks.

Clearly, this is the way of the future. In 20 years, e-readers could well be as ubiquitous as cellphones are today. The technology will improve and prices will come down.

New-media experts Matthew Buckland, who heads up the 20FourLabs innovation unit at 24.com, and Elan Lohmann, general manager of Avusa Media Online, say that newspapers should be on as many digital platforms as possible but at the moment it may not be worth South African publishers putting time and money into optimising content for the Kindle or iPad… TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY MEDIA COLUMN ON MONEYWEB.

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2009 was such a horrendous year for print media, up against the wall because of the fall in advertising revenue and a decline in circulation, that I was surprised and cheered to stumble across a publication that actually succeeded in growing ad revenue.

Unless you’re a Business Day subscriber, you wouldn’t have come across Wanted, which was started five and a half years ago and is modelled on How to Spend It, the magazine put out by the Financial Times. Just like How to Spend It, it’s a glossy high-end monthly magazine and its advertisers are luxury brands such as Pernod Ricard, Vendome and Montblanc.

Advertising doesn’t come cheap in Wanted and even though the luxury-goods companies were hit by the recession last year, Wanted still exceeded its ad targets. In the 2008/09 financial year (till the end of March) the magazine exceeded its target by 140%, says Antoinette van Wyk, who oversees Wanted’s advertising. At the moment, with about two months to go before the end of the 2009/10 financial year, they’ve hit the 140% mark.

Wanted’s editor, Gary Cotterell, says he knew that luxury-goods companies would be affected by the recession last year and was pleasantly surprised that the magazine maintained its growth. Most months last year, the magazine was over 60 pages and even got up to 138 pages. (Advertising determines the amount of pages you print in newspapers and magazines.)

In a year when many magazines shut up shop in South Africa, this is really remarkable.

Part of Wanted’s success can be attributed to it being one of the very few South African magazines to play in the luxury space. There are a couple of others such as Prestige but, really, Wanted is in a class of its own as it’s packed with original content. Prestige always seems a tad press-release driven… TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN ON MONEYWEB, CLICK HERE.

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Not sure that the assumptions in this graphic below hold water but it’s still a nice graphic so I have decided to post it anyway. What do you think? Is social media killing magazines? Are you getting more from Twitter and Facebook than a magazine can provide you with?

Infographic by CartridgeSAVE.co.uk

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There is a major row between South Africa’s editors and Fifa, the owners of the Soccer World Cup, over what the editors charge are outrageous infringements on our constitutional right to freedom of expression.

The SA Media interest group, a group made up of members of the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) and industry body Print Media South Africa, are unhappy about a raft of Fifa requirements for journalist who apply for accreditation to cover the tournament. Among the main areas of contention are:

1. Newspapers will not be able to push pictures on to their mobile platforms (they can, however, push text);
2. There are restrictions on newspapers doing video packages for their websites;
3. That reporters will not be able to report on the names of hotels in which the teams are staying;
4. No newspapers will be able to sell papers within the restricted zone around stadiums, which has a radius of about 800m;
5. Although Fifa commits itself to guaranteeing freedom of expression there is also a clause that says that news organisations may not bring Fifa into disrepute; and
6. Many of the terms and conditions apply to reporters and photographers and their “organisations” (suggesting their colleagues, some of whom will not be covering the World Cup) rather than “employer” (ie, their editors).

Fifa’s Zurich-based media head, Pekka Odriozola, told me that the requirements have applied to previous World Cups. He also said Fifa respects freedom of expression, that its intentions are good and that it has dealt with and explained its position further in writing to Sanef to iron out misunderstandings.

But the SA Media interest group – for whom the point man in dealing with Fifa is former Rand Daily Mail editor Raymond Louw – says the written clarifications are not satisfactory and that the seriousness of the issue demands that they are able to sit down formally with Fifa and deal with the contentious issues, clause by clause – rather than in broad discussions as has happened in the past.

Thabo Leshilo, head of Sanef’s media freedom committee, said: “It’s outrageous what Fifa is used to getting away with. The tragedy though is the virtual absence of outrage by local media and editors on the violation of freedom of the press on such a scale. The local media has simply lost the will to fight and is simply going along so long as it can cover the event. It’s not too late though to catch a wake up.”… TO READ MORE OF MY MONDAY COLUMN ON MONEYWEB, CLICK HERE.

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