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 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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1. What a wacky night in Rome! About 200 Italian women who responded to an ad to come demurely dressed to the Libyan embassy for a swanky do found themselves being lectured by Moammar Gadaffi himself, “the guide of the first of September great revolution of the socialist people’s Libyan Arab jamahiriya”, dressed in black uniform and a beret about … wait for it … the role of women and why they should convert to Islam. He also told them he had it on good authority (it must be very high up) that Jesus Christ wasn’t crucified on the cross. It was someone who looked a lot like him. What a classic story! Click here to read it at the Mail & Guardian.

2. Then Tim Cohen in Business Day picked up on a delightful and fascinating tale by a British hack who had written about witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. The journo, Daniel Johnson, wrote about a marvellous accident of history in which two questions at a press conference led to the East German government spokesman erroneously telling the press that travel restrictions at the wall had been lifted immediately. Hey presto, the people took to the streets and the rest is history. Well done to Tim for flagging it (read his column here) and click here to read Daniel Johnson’s (very, very long) original piece. Also coming from the reams written on the anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was this little nugget at Daily Telegraph:  a story about an upsurge in East German retro chic.

What a lot of fun! Check out this Trabant ad from the 1960s I unearthed on YouTube. What on earth are those wimpy guys in white suits jumping into the car so merrily about and could this be the genesis of Top Gear’s Styg?

And then in SA, the Daily Maverick was the only site I could see that did a proper profile of Kumi Naidoo, the South African who was made head of Greenpeace (internationally). Interesting guy and a nice in-depth piece!

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The Mail & Guardian came up tops this week for the juciest, hottest little Carl Hiaasen story born out of a public spat played out on its pages between the Western Cape’s former premier Ebrahim Rasool and the ANC’s chief whip in the Western Cape legislature, Max Ozinsky.

Under the classic headline “Brown-envelope journalism”, the M&G reported today that a shareholder in a top media services company has alleged in a two-hour taped phone conversation with former Western Cape premier Lynne Brown that Cape Town journalists are being paid cash “in brown envelopes” to influence stories for ­political ends. Get this gobsmacking snippet from the tape, which is in the M&G’s possession. To understand it, you need to know that Joe Aranes is an executive editor at the Cape Argus newspaper and Pokwana is Vukile ­Pokwana, former accounts director at Hip-Hop Media.

“I am saying, Premier, Joe Aranes does that, but I was saying to Thabo [Mabaso, a former Cape Argus journalist] now, he is so weak. This thing of handling brown envelopes, he still does it until today. … Brown envelopes, Premier, they are nice … you can blow it, you can drink every day, feed off other ­habits,” Pokwana told Brown.

Goodness me! When I was a reporter in Cape Town, I came to view the  politics there as a dirty backstabbing business of the first degree. The allegation that senior journalists may have been on the take really gets my creative juices flowing. I can see a great novel in this.

The Rasool-Ozinsky saga has also been fascinating. Ozinsky wrote an  opinion piece  for the M&G saying he could no longer stay quiet about what he perceived to be a serious misuse of power by Rasool. He also said:

Rasool became intimately involved in briefing journalists, and at least one senior journalist from the Cape Argus, but I believe more, benefited financially from their proximity to a web of companies contracted by the province,” wrote Ozinsky. “I don’t make this allegation lightly; there is proof. The journalist was compelled to resign because of it.

Which is where the “Brown-envelope journalism” seems to come from.

Click here to read Ozinsky’s opinion piece, which ran on the same day on the same page as a letter from Rasool talking of a “Faustian pact between some in the ANC and the DA”. Read about the spat here in the M&G story reporting that  Membathisi Mdladlana, who is the head of the provincial task team, had told both Rasool and Ozinsky to keep their battle within ANC circles.

The other really cool story of the week was picked up and played big by the newly launched Daily Maverick website, about a groundbreaking dinosaur find in the Free State. Well done guys for spotting an interesting offbeam story and projecting it in a week dominated by Eishkom. Must say though that I’m finding it hard to navigate the Mavericks’s design as there are few obvious entry points. Guys, you’ve got to graduate your stories and vary those point sizes!

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Golly. It’s looking a little dire at South African blog aggregator Amatomu, which is owned by the Mail & Guardian. There’s niet up on the front page sans this rather woeful message:

Dear Amatomu user

Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.

Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.

However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.

Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.

Jason

Technical Manager

Mail & Guardian

Click here to go there. It’s tough out there for everyone as we hit the depths of the recession so we’ll see if someone snaps up Amatomu. I checked in on it reasonably often as it’s a helpful indicator of how your blog is doing (and others) but one does have to wonder about its central weakness: that the aggregation was done by a computer and not people. Watch this space, folks, as Grubstreet has been working on something really fun and useful in just this sphere called Grubstreet.select. All will be revealed soon!

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A friend of mine told me last week: “I work for a wanker. The only problem is that I am the wanker.”

It was frippery, of course, but it captures our times as we’ve hit the depths of the worst recession in living memory. In the good times companies can afford to be benevolent to their staff; in the bad times they can get downright evil.

Even my friend, who has prided himself on evading the corporate world to create a sustainable small business is having to make hard decisions but because his staff are a small, close-knit team, he also wants to treat them fairly even if it means countless sleepless nights for him and taking a hit in revenue.

Most of us, unfortunately, find ourselves in the same position as our parents’ generation, working for big companies that we know will put us out to pasture at 50 because it’s cheaper to retrench us than keep us on at the salaries we’ve worked so hard over decades to increase.  We’ve seen it happen to many of our parents and, over the past year, to our older colleagues.

At the end of last year I was working for a big firm that cut a large number of staff in a voluntary retrenchment programme and witnessed the enormous damage to morale as people had to say goodbye to favourite colleagues and then take on extra responsibility for no extra pay and little prospect of bonuses or increases – all the while wondering if they were next, should the company move to involuntary retrenchments.

But I have also detected something else on the wind: an upsurge in entrepreneurial yearning where many are plotting how to break free from the corporate world and strike out on their own so that they can control their own destinies.

Right now might not be the time to do it but I don’t think we can underestimate the change in people’s attitudes to the corporate world and to money that this recession has brought… TO READ THE FULL PIECE, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY MONEYWEB COLUMN.

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Time to send out a bit of blog love. Business Day editor Peter Bruce launched his blog at the paper’s website this week and said some very cool things about Grubstreet in his inaugural post.

Ah, shucks, you make me blush, Mr Bruce.

But, seriously, thanks very much Peter and welcome to the blogosphere. I’ll be checking out your blog regularly as I always read your Monday column in the paper. It’s always pithy and well informed and you certainly march to the sound of your own drum. Might have something to do with those Eastern Cape roots….

I applaud editors of major newspapers who have their own blogs as it provides an excellent insight into the selection of the news every day and the thinking at the paper.

This is the start of a blog zone for the paper and other writers will be joining the ed. so it should be well worth checking in on. I certainly hope The Bottom Line will have a blog. That’s another favourite read.

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Just a quick post to say I’ve scanned the ether  and can say with confidence that a couple of hours after Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s mid-term budget in Parliament, Moneyweb wins hands down for accessable and authoritive insight into the budget.

The entry point to the package is the “Mini budget in a nutshell” (with a very quirky graphic of an unzipped nut), which is a neat little list of all the major changes with links to a bunch of excellent in-depth analysis, for example, the relaxing of exchange controls, concerns over a strong rand and the debate over inflation targetting. To get such  a wide-ranging package up so fast means they planned it in advance and then moved fast today. Well done, guys.

Most of the other big SA sites have focused on the fact that President Jacob Zuma’s bigger cabinet and presidency will come in an extra half a billion rand in “unforeseeable” expenses this year.

Glory be! That’s a bit pricey, especially considering that in the corporate world managers are being retrenched and positions combined because of the recession. But then what can we ordinary folk do? We must in the words of our past masters “mos kak en betaal”.

Click here for the full text of the speech.

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"I'm extinct too... how much would I get on auction?"

1. My absolute favourite story of the week comes from the dusty nether regions of the East London museum, where the world’s only known dodo egg is the subject of a court dispute with the family of the famous Marjorie Courtney-Latimer. There’s mulitple twists and turns to the tale but basically it comes down to the family of Courtney-Latimer, who was the curator of the museum for decades and put it on the map with the discovery in the 1930s of the coelecanth, wanting the dodo egg back as they say it was only loaned to the museum by Marg. Read this fascinating story here at the Daily Dispatch.

2. Then over to Mashable where Sports Illustrated in the US was outed by a Diggit bookmarker from Bahrain for soliciting bookmarks for the magazine’s website with an offer of Sports Illustrated merchandise. It’s the comments thread on the outing that’s worth the read with many people saying that this kind of thing goes on all the time. Here’s the SI email posted on Diggit but you gotta love these two comments on the issue:

“Oh my God! Companies pay people to plug their products and services on social networking sites!
Also, the earth revolves around the sun. News at 11.”

“Quick to the doughnut shop immediately….we have to contact Michael Moore about this evil capitalism going on.”

3. Then in the UK, there’s been a major stoem over a Daily Mail column about the boy band star Stephen Gately, which seems to be more than a tad homophobic. Twitter heavies Stephen Fry and Derren Brown denounced the column and there were more than 21 000 complaints to the country’s Press Complaints Commission, causing its website to crash — this is more complaints in a single weekend than the regulator has received in total in the past five years! Comments are streaming into the Daily Mail’s website and my guess is that the furore will cause a major spike in the paper’s site traffic. Click here to read the story with all the relevant links at Editor’s Weblog.

4. Then we have some excellent analysis pieces from law expert and blogger Pierre de Vos on the legal issues involved in Schabir Shaik’s bid for a presidential pardon, Greta Steyn of Fin24 on the electrricity hikes and the economy and an opinion piece at Business Day saying there is a case to be made for Eskom raising capital with the World Bank rather than punishing the SA consumer even more. If olny.

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Men’s Health had a great story this week about two South African surfers who happened to be in Sumatra when the big quake hit. It’s cool to see a magazine get a break on a big story like this and they played it perfectly: a first-person account of the disaster. It also produces the quote of the week, from one of the surfer bunnies, Andrew Brady, from Cape Town:

I locked eyes with Greame during the most violent part of the quake and the feeling of “oh f#ckness” was mutual as the buildings around us began to collapse!

Then off to disaster of another kind: when one man’s unbuntu get’s a kick in the teeth. The Daily Dispatch had a story about a man who help a house warming party in the burbs to get to know his neighbours and ended up being attacked in his bedroom by two goons. What is this world coming to? A very sad barometer of out violent times.

And then Carl Hiaasen, eat your heart out! The Jackie Selebi trial is turning out to be THE soap opera of the year. Everyday this week there have been new accusations of dodgy intentions, dirt and corruption. What amuses me is the image of Glenn Agliotti cruising Sandton for shoes for Selebi and Thabo Mbeki. What kind of a crook  is this, for heaven sake? Doesn’t he have a wife or a flusie of some kind to do the shopping of bribery wares for him? Click here to go to the M&G’s very nicely presented special report on the trial.

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