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.

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.

1. Early in the week, Independent Newspaper’s business section reported that Eskom executives were set to appear before parliament’s public enterprises portfolio committee to explain why about R10 billion is owed to the  power entity in back payments — amounting to19% of its revenue in the last financial year.

2. The next day, Business Report reported that it had emerged before the portfolio committee that Eskom had struck a secret pricing deal to supply BHP Billiton to power its massive aluminium smelters at 12c a kilowatt hour — below the cost of electricity production. This alone accounted for the bulk of Eskom’s R9.5 billion loss last year.

3. Then, it reported that DA MP Pieter van Dalen had released a “secret” Eskom dossier on Facebook as Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan confirmed that a contract would lock the utility into supplying cheap power to neighbouring states until 2025.

Well done to the veteran reporters Donwald Pressly and Melanie Gosling for owning this bomb of a story all week. I suspect the Sunday papers are beetling around trying to turn up a new break on the Eskom saga for the weekend.

4. Business Day ran a good analysis piece today by Eusebius McKaiser on what has emerged this week, in which he points out:

One particularly callous upshot of all this is the possibility that the little people are cross-subsidising the operational expenditure of the big guys. Add to all of this the additional macroeconomic insult that some companies bring iron ore from abroad, smelt it here and then export the intermediary product for further use in value chains elsewhere, and Eskom’s preferential treatment goes from being economically unfair on individual households to being economically disastrous for some of our industry sectors.

5. And if this is all giving you a headache as your household budget buckles under the strain of Eskom tariff hikes while the power utility buggers around making under-the-table deals, then here’s a bit levity: IOL ran a delightful story from the Daily Mail of a British woman who suffered a radical migraine in March and came out of it speaking with a Chinese accent.  And, no, the good woman from Plymouth has never been to China.

It’s for my five-year-old daughter so she can keep her little armies warm during ballet in the winter.

QUESTION: Where does Noddy keep his armies? ANSWER: Up his sleevies.

My mother searched her memory banks and declared it was my gran who made the jersey for me but she was pretty certain it was from a FairLady pattern. So she wrote off to FairLady and, low and behold, yesterday she got a letter in the post from a “Tasneem” at FairLady saying they had searched their archive and found it for her — from the January 1979 edition of the magazine no less! Enclosed was a photocopy of the pattern of very same jersey!

I really think that’s incredible. They must searched the archive — I doubt it’s digitised and they would have moved buildings a few times over the years — of the late 1970s, found it and also took the trouble to write my dear old mum a letter to go with it.

Now that’s how you engender loyalty among readers. After not having read FairLady for years, I will be off to buy a copy on point of principal as you seldom get personal help and service like this these days. A gold star for Tasneem!

Here’s what took my fancy this week and it’s a disparate bag of delights:

1. First up, a fascinating AP story at News24 about how sports scientists have now discovered that stretching before exercise will in fact decrease your performance and raise the risk of injury. Better to do a little jogging or kick the soccer ball around and then stretch later before you go to bed — or preferably in yoga and Pilates classes, where your body is correctly aligned and you’re stretching the joints and ligaments together with the muscles. Read the story here.

2. Then the super smart Ann Crotty at Business Report did a really great in-depth feature about SAB and how its finally losing its dominance in the SA beer market. Click here to read the story and how’s about this really fab intro:

Back in the 1980s the then chief executive of South African Breweries (SAB), Meyer Kahn, used to correct anyone who referred to SAB as a monopoly. “We’re not a monopoly, we’re a temporary sole supplier,” Kahn would say with a remarkably straight face.

3. Drew Forrest over at the M&G, who is another of our most thoughtful SA journalists, has got a interesting follow-up to the Cradle of Humankind fossil find announced last week: There’s a little frission between palaeontologists worldwide over the significance of the find with American palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the “Lucy” skeleton in Ethiopia, saying that this yet another evolutionary cul-de-sac. (The true cradle of humankind is in East Africa, of course, according to him.) Click here to read the story.

4. The volcanic ash from Iceland that grounded flights in the UK and is now moving over Europe came out if left field. Who knew such a thing could happen and have such disastrous effects? Click here to read the Daily Mail’s comprehensive story on the event.

5. And then one that slipped off the radar screen in SA: that Eskom was caught out by Nersa overstating its costs — to the tune of R1.487bn for the three financial years to 2012/13 — in order to secure its 35% tariff hike.   I would pursue this Fin24 story if I were a Sunday paper as this really riles the poor benighted consumer in this country, myself included. Click here to read the Fin24 story.

6. Another one worth the weekend papers pursuing is a BBC story on research just released from the Pew Research Centre. The survey is the biggest-ever studies on attitudes to religion and morality in Africa. The Beeb picked out 10 cool facts, including that 75% of South Africans think polygamy is “morally wrong”, that belief in witchcraft is highest in Tanzania (with 93%) and that at least half of the Christians questioned expect Jesus Christ to return to earth during their lifetimes. Click here to go to the BBC story, at which you can download the report.

The website is  certainly the first stop for all media luvvies checking out the job market (hence my real-time jobs barometer based on Bizcommunity’s job ads) and their media reporter, Issa Sikiti da Silva, doesn’t miss much on breaking media news so Bizcommunity has become something of a website of record in this sphere.

I must say the Bizcommunity folk are an extremely nice and welcoming bunch with Simone Puterman, the managing editor, a very thoughtful editor and a live wire of note — she’s very quick off the mark on picking news up on new-media networks such as Twitter.

I’ll be doing the same kind of columns at Bizcommunity as I did for Moneyweb: mostly ferreting out and analysing trends in the media but I will  now be able to expand my focus from the business of media into other avenues of our media world in all its “interesting-ness”. This is the main reason I am moving as I felt a tad cramped in my subject matter as a Moneyweb columnist, with it being a business and financial website.

So watch this space: My first column for Bizcommunity kicks off with exploring the complicated world of Amps. The readership figures are not easy to get your head around if you’re an ordinary hack — which is probably why most media reporters deal with them in the most general terms. Anyway,  I gave it a stab and hope I can shed some light on them for you.

Click here to read a Grubstreet interview with top media planner Gordon Muller on the value of Amps.

To the styling folk at Moneyweb — especially owner and boss Alec Hogg, a superb financial journalist and an extremely decent, kind man who is generous with passing on his knowledge  — I say thank you very much for giving me the platform to explore my voice as a media commentator.  Alec really gave me my gap at Moneyweb last year about four months after I started Grubstreet  and for that I’ll be eternally in your debt,  Alec — and for your friendship and wise advice.

We also saw a hilarious scene on live TV at e.tv with the AWB’s Andre Visagie got into a little fracas with the presenter. I don’t know which is funnier – the AWB man’s smirking bodyguard, Visagie or the presenter yelling: “You don’t touch me on my studio”:

On a more serious note, there was much hand wringing over the state of the country’s race relations post Terre’Blanche’s death in the context of Malema’s inflammatory behaviour of the past month. I think political analyst Peter Vale produced the most thoughtful piece I came across. Click here to read at the Daily Dispatch and here’s an excerpt:

…whatever politicians say to the contrary, nation-building is complicated. Simple dogma once championed by Terre’B lanche and, more recently, advocated by Julius Malema says nothing about the rich (but truly brutal) underbelly of South Africa’s past. Due to this, their words are emptied of any understanding, let alone explanation, of the human experience in the North West Province…

Click here to read the full piece.

Then there is an absolutely fascinating story, out today, of  Wits paleontologist Professor Lee Berger and his nine-year-old son, Matthew, discovering the fossil of a new hominid species, Australopithecus sediba, at a newly discovered cave site in the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng. The prof and his son set off on the investigation of the cave after noodling around with  the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth.

Most SA’s websites have the story but, once again I’m going to refer you to the Daily Dispatch — my local newspaper in East London which unfailingly shows its finely-honed nose for news. The Dispatch ran a much more comprehensive version of the story compared with the big websites. The latter  missed out on the fascinating Google Earth angle.  This is a BIG scientific story — hugely significant in paleontology, which is the study of our human origin — and serendipitosly reminds us of mankind’s common African roots at a time when the country (post-Terre’Blanche’s murder) is more preoccupied with what what divides rather than unites us. Click here to read the Dispatch story.

The last story of the week is not a story but a lively, interesting new website in South Africa well worth checking out if you’re even vaguely interested in media – new and old – and all things tech.

New-media guru Matthew Buckland launched Memeburn, SA’s answer to Mashable and TechCrunch, last week and it’s cooking. It’s very nicely designed with loads of interesting, informative  stories — none too long but with a pleasingly jaunty voice. There are wide range of writers and it’s kudos to Matthew for being able to twist so many writers’ arms (myself included) to contribute for free while he works on getting the revenue model up and running. We’re all doing it because Matthew is a very savvy entrepreneur and a  lekker oke to boot.  Click here to check Memebun  out.

There’s a fascinating break on the Eugene Terre’Blanche story from an unlikely quarter — the Daily Dispatch in East London. Or perhaps it’s not so unlikely.

The paper’s veteran reporter and investigations editor Eddie Botha called around Ventersdorp yesterday to discover that the murder could well have taken place earlier than what the police have been saying. Ventersdorp paramedics chief Robert van Heerden, who went to Terre’Blanche’s farm after being called shortly before 7pm, said that Terre’Blanche had been dead for quite some time when he first saw him and added: “All I can say is that the scene, which I saw, did not make any sense.”

Another Venterdorp dominee said he believed (from what he had been told by paramedics) that TerreBlanche could have been killed as early as 3pm.

Botha also interviewed Reverend Armond van Zyl of the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk  in Ventersdorp, who said that Terre’Blanche’s wife had told him she had spoken to her husband earlier that day and he had said he was not staying on the farm that night. The couple’s home was in town and Terre’Blanche would go out to the farm every second night.

Click here to read the Dispatch story.

So curious questions about the course of events at the farm that day and one has to wonder what the police investigators have been up to. It seems the police took the time of death (between 5pm and 6pm) from what the two accused told them and haven’t checked out other sources of information and evidence.

But, for me, it also raises questions about the quality of media reporting on the murder. Every major news organisation has had reporters in Ventersdorp all week and none of them has unearthed what Eddie did in a couple of hours on the telephone. It’s a real indictment of the quality of journalism in our country as it seems the hysteria around making the connection between Terre’Blanche’s murder and Julius Malema has seen editors and news editors across the land take their collective eye off the ball. Sies!

Eddie, a good friend with whom I have had the pleasure of working with at the Dispatch, is a really experienced news hound and I look forward to more stories from him as he heads off to Ventersdorp today. But he didn’t pull a magic bunny  out of the hat here. He started with covering the basics — talking to people connected to the murder victim and people around the investigation beyond the police spokesman. It is truly astonishing that he is the first to do so – five days after the story broke!

Another bleeding obvious story to do (which I haven’t seen yet in the media but let me know If I missed it) is a portrait of Terre’Blanche’s recent life in Ventersdorp. He dropped off the national stage utterly when he went to prison and we know nothing of what he was like and what he was doing afterwards.

Had he moved on from politics, leading a quiet life in a farming town? Was trying to resusitate the AWB? What kind of husband and father was he? Was he involved in the Kerk? What was his financial situation? Did he drink at the local bar and what did he talk about when he was there? What kind of farm boss was he? What did the farm workers think of him?

On another surprising and more amusing front, there was a ruckus live on e.tv last night when AWB secretary general André Visagie stormed out of a discussion after heckling from political commentator Lebohang Pheko and a bit of pushing and shoving between himself and presenter Chris Maroleng. Note Visage’s highly amused and ineffectual bodyguard in the background in the video:

It all goes to show why the AWB eventually became an isolated movement worthy of  farce. Sure, Visagie was being heckled but dealing with that in a calm, commanding fashion is a prerequisite for being a politician.

As they say, if you want to run with the hounds, you can’t piss with the puppies. And, frankly, the same goes for  the reporters knocking about Ventersdorp all week.

Click here to read the News24 story on the e.tv ruckus.

Click here to read my earlier post on how Terre’Blanche’s death has set SA off on a major soul searching on the race relations and the state of our nation.

Bun is hugely respected in the industry as a very smart news hack and thoroughly decent individual so it seems an excellent appointment. I had the pleasure of having him as a guest lecturer on a Poynter journalism course I did many years ago and thought he was the bee’s knees. He clearly had an excellent nose for news and was very generous with his knowledge – so lucky folk at Die Burger in Cape Town.

It’s a little unclear what Booysens predecessor, Henry Jeffreys, will be doing. According to the Media24  on Bizcomminity (who were the first to pick  up on the buzz on Twitter), Jeffreys will be “keep his ties with the company, writing a regular column for some of the newspapers and lecturing at Media24′s Journalism Academy”.

That’s the academy run by that Mathatha Tsedu, previously the City Press editor and who also did a  short stint as editor of the Sunday Times between Mike Robertson and Mondli Makhanya.  It does suggest that — like Makhanya very recently at the Sunday Times — Jeffreys is being sent quietly on his way to more ephemeral pastures.

I guess the musical chairs at Media24 and Avusa  may well be a consequence of last year’s recession, when many newspapers were hit by declining circulation and a fall in advertising. All media house owners are chastened by the experience and are probably  looking for more bang for their buck when it comes to editors.

Click here to read my previous post on the Avusa reshuffling and here to read Anton Harber’s take on it.

So what’s up at Biermann Avenue? It’s certainly a promotion for Ray Hartley as he gets the jewel in Avusa’s crown though its under circulation pressure, is facing an aggressive play for market share from Media24′s City Press and Rapport and it was hit by a severe decline in careers advertising last year amid the recession. (Click here to read an interview I did with Mondli about the Sunday Times a few weeks back.)

Ray’s appointment is an excellent one: he knows the Sunday Times inside out as he was their very smart political editor and head of news for years before he took over at The Times when it was launched a few years ago. Ray is also a strategic thinker and plays his cards close to his chest so I think we will see the battle for the Sunday broadsheet readers hotting up.

For Mondli, I’m not so sure it’s a promotion. The company’s press release says he will be “charged with setting up and running centres of excellence that will produce unique, original and compelling content for all of the group’s newspapers and websites. In this new role, he would also represent the interests of editors on the Avusa Media management committee”.

I’m skeptical that he will have much to do in his new role. He no longer has a title of his own and the publishing responsibilities of Avusa’s newspapers are taken care of  by CEO Mike Robertson, also a former editor of the Sunday Times, along with various operations chiefs. That phrase “centres of excellence” has a hollow ring to it — much as someone being tasked with looking after “special projects” does.

Phylicia’s appointment is a big promotion and we’ve seen her raising her profile over the past two months with her column at The Times so this is not entirely unexpected as she has long been in Robertson’s inner circle.

What can I say about her taking over at The Times, the daily newspaper given  free to Sunday Times subscribers? Well, dear user, not too much lest I stray into the arena of defamation. I can say I have known her for many years, once counted her as a friend and worked for her in various capacities when she was editor of the Daily Dispatch.  But, let’s see, I can say these complementary complimentary things: she’s ambitious and has an impeccable dress sense.