If you haven’t caught the Penguins of Madagascar spin-off series on DStv’s Nickelodeon then you’re missing out. They have all the makings of a cult classic and my five-year-old daughter and I race for the remote when they’re on. Here’s a tribute to Rico, who’s soul reason for being in the Fab Four is to regurgitate useful stuff up. These penguins have, as Skipper would say, major moxy.

Question: You have said you want to have news from all the provinces beyond the major urban areas such as Joburg, Cape Town and Durban. But I can’t see how good news is going to sell in the rural areas such as the Transkei in the Eastern Cape, where people are trapped in desperate poverty and they feel abandoned by the provincial and local governments. Clinics are not staffed properly and do not have the drugs they should; the schools are falling apart…

Mvoko: Look, you would find it hard to convince someone who feels hard done by lack of service delivery. Being at the receiving end of inefficiency or injustice or lack of service delivery hardly makes you receptive to a good-news story because your world is bad. But what we’re saying is that rational thought should form part of any public discourse and give credit where it is due. That is not to say we’re going to tell everybody that everything is hunky dory, thank you very much…And it doesn’t mean we’re going to listen to every politician who says “we’ve done a lot”. We will interrogate those facts…

Question: You might feel you’re a pathfinder but lots of people see The New Age as a government mouthpiece. Aren’t you worried how this position will reflect on you professionally?

Mvoko: I’m not worried. The reality is that each and every editor is under some pressure or the other on a consistent basis. There are people who want to influence you, not just your stories on a particular day but also the direction of your publication…My point is that the whole holier-than-thou attitude (towards The New Age) is not on. The issue for the editor is how you deal with those pressures, how you make sure that at the end of the day you service your reader and speak to the values of your editorial direction. You will lose some and you will win some.

Click here to read the full interview at Bizcommunity.

I believe Vuyo when he says this but, frankly, it is highly unlikely that the Gupta family who is the major shareholder in The New Age’s publishers and is close to the Zuma family, will not want Zuma-friendly coverage and for those in Zuma’s inner circle. Click here to read a May 2010 story by the M&G on the relationship between the Guptas and the Zumas.

Vuyo Mvoko

Of course, Mvoko is right about pressures on editors countrywide but The New Age is quite openly ANC-aligned: besides the Gupta funding, Essop Pahad is on the board of directors, one of Zuma’s son was floating around at the paper’s launch and  The New Age name is a resusitation of a 1960s ANC journal.

Mvoko says the paper will be critical of government when its needs to be and the raison d’etre here is to do good news but, let’s face it, when you’ve got 32 pages to fill on a daily basis, all those crime and grime stories will have to be used. The government news agency, BuaNews, is already paid to find happy-camper delivery stories and they don’t come up with more than a handful  a day. Then the pressure will really come down on Mvoko’s head so watch that space.  I would advise that Mvoko try avoid taking calls from unhappy publishing higher-ups as much as possible. This apparently worked well for Zwelakhe Sisulu when he was head of the SABC.

The other interesting things about The New Age is:

1. The sheer ambition of the project. Conventional wisdom tells us that new newspapers take four to five years to break even so you have to have deep pockets to go the distance. There are plans for 170 000 circulation sold at R3.50 (the biggest paper in the country, the Daily Sun, has taken more than five years to get to about 480 000 sold for R2.30 and they started at a R1 cover price). On top of that there are plans to buy a press, which will be megabucks, and give us overcapacity in the SA printing industry as both Media24 and Caxton have fabulous modern web presses.   (Look out Avusa, who has said it is looking for new options beyond its TNPC joint printing venture with the Independent Group in Johannesburg.) Click here for a very good article at The Daily Maverick on the business side of things at The New Age.

2. The fact that The New Age will be an unusual format for SA — the narrower Financial Times format — and is breaking with convention and offering advertising on centimetre square basis as well as column centimetre. I asked a senior media planner if this will prove to be a hassle to advertisers and he said:

With regards the pricing…they will offer two forms of pricing to begin with…traditional column centimetre rates as well as the per square centimetre rate. The square centimetre method does give advertisers more flexibility in terms of sizes, but I don’t know that many advertisers will see it this way. I would think most advertisers would just supply the same sized material that they produce for the other papers anyway. I do think it is going to cause huge confusion though when it comes to advertising agencies’ billing systems and how we load and invoice clients. I think there could quite likely end up being many account queries because the agency understood things to be one way, but the newspaper understands them to be another way. So I think if they proceed in this manner, it will be an interesting first few months until everyone gets their heads around the calculation of rates and ad sizes… They say they adopted the model from The Times of India and that whilst it did cause confusion there for a while, it has become the new standard in terms of how all newspapers there now do business. Time will tell how it will work here.

3. I am getting the sense that The Times of India is a very active strategic partner in The New Age’s owners, TNA Media. The New Age’s IT system is a repilca of theirs, The New Age is adopting advertising measures from them and Mvoko told me that The Times of India’s publisher was in SA about two weeks ago to meet with him and others. The Times of India is a massively successful operation — about 4-million daily circulation — so they certainly know their potatoes when it come to English publications in multilingual developing nations. I think they are the best thing that The New Age has going for him and, who knows, maybe The Times of India’s publisher is looking for a foothold in SA with an eye on our substantial Indian community that is by and large a high-LSM group. In the press release for the paper’s launch, The Times of India’s group CEO, Ravi Dhariwal, said: “We are excited about this opportunity to partner with a new national daily and a young nation. We will work closely with our partners in The New Age to fulfill their commitment to produce a quality broadsheet while empowering the emerging South Africa”.

4. What has also puzzled me is the presence of Essop Pahad, Thabo Mbeki’s minister in the presidency and his main enforcer. What does this mean? Is Pahad looking for political comeback by getting on the right side of  Zuma? How fascinating. We shall see what we shall see. Click here for Alec Hogg’s interview with Pahad  on his SAfm radio show.

So Piers Morgan might be replacing Larry King (click here to read the Daily Maverick story), which would be pretty interesting if it came to pass. I rather liked the “Piers Morgan On…” show, especially the way he asked awkward questions in such a nice, nonconfrontational manner — and usually got the answers. One of the things Morgan is most famous for is being punched by Jeremy Clarkson at a British Press Awards function. In this vid, Parkinson asks him about it.

It makes for a dramatic business story because, 15 years ago, the companies were of a similar size but now Naspers is an aggressive multinational that has forged an adventurous and lucrative path into the digital arena in countries such as China and Russia. The sexiest thing you can say about Avusa, however, is that it is the owner of the Sunday Times but even that has lost its cachet. Once South Africa’s biggest paper, that title now goes to the Daily Sun, owned by – you guessed it – Naspers.

So while Naspers seems savvy, Avusa appears shambolic. Naspers is bold and brave. Avusa doesn’t seem to have a plan.

But is it really fair to compare the two? Avusa is actually in the “B” league, same as Caxton, the printing firm and owners of The Citizen and a large number of community papers. Caxton’s financial year-end is at the end of June, so its annual results will be out in about September. Naspers is in the “A” league -and uniquely so in South Africa.

Click here to get a handle on the scope of the Naspers empire that spans the newspapers and magazines of Media24 (such as City Press and Rapport) to MultiChoice in SA and across the continent to Internet operations in Brazil, Eastern Europe and India. Now click here to have a look at Avusa’s company structure, which is SA-based (in fact the company pulled back a few years ago from Africa) and mostly old media: newspapers, book publishing, cinema, book stores and music.

So, separating the two companies out, what do the analysts say about them?….. Click here to read the rest of the column at Bizcommunity.

Gill Moodie: The first South African media folk really knew about NewsDay was that the Zimbabwean Media Commission granted permission for new newspapers in the country and then a week later (on June 7), you launched NewsDay. I would imagine that you had been preparing for this for quite some time?
Trevor Ncube: Yes, which is why we have basically been able to hit the ground running. We have had over the past 12 months a core team to which we’ve been adding as we thought the prospects were improving for us to be registered (by the commission). For me, the turning point was the inclusive government (with Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister). When I saw it being put in place and in it there was a strong component about freeing up of the media, that was the window that I was looking for and I said: ‘This is our time; we’ve always wanted to do this’. So we started preparations then.

NewsDay's website.

Moodie: And this was about a year ago?
Ncube: Yes, on September 15 last year. That’s when we really started putting together a business plan in earnest and asking ourselves: ‘What do we need?’ One of the first things I identified was that we needed was a printing press because we didn’t have one.

Moodie: What have you been printing on up till now?
Ncube: We owned 25% of a printing press but we were not in charge of the management of that printing press.

Moodie: May I ask who is ‘we’?
Ncube: I shouldn’t use ‘we’. Alpha Media Holdings is the company that publishes NewsDay. I control 61% of that company and we publish two other weeklies (in Zimbabwe): the Zimbabwean Independent, which is a business weekly, and The Standard, which is a Sunday newspaper. We have a printing company that does commercial printing and we’ve just added a newspaper web press to that. The first challenge in buying the web press was the fundraising. The second was to go out and find the press.

Moodie: Which is a big deal. Did you have to go to Europe?
Ncube: We went to the Netherlands. We found one there and we did it in record time. We also had to identify a building (in Harare) that could accommodate a printing press but there wasn’t one. We had to build a new factory for the press, with a purpose-built foundations so that it doesn’t shake and so on.

Moodie: The web press itself must have cost about R40 or R50-million?
Ncube: No, it wasn’t exactly a brand new press but, ja, it wasn’t cheap. And then we had to ship it. Identifying the press and shipping it into Durban, building the press and putting it in – we did it in a record six months.

Moodie: That’s amazing. The standard is about 18 months, isn’t it?
Ncube: Yes, and our factory is one of the best printing press facilities that I’ve seen in the world – immaculately staffed, which tells us that there are still skills in Zimbabwe. When I went into that printing press I was so proud… To get the printers, we poached from other printers but we also found unemployed people. Industry in Zimbabwe is running at between 20% and 30% of capacity and unemployment is around 80% or 90% depending on who you listen to. So there are lot of skilled people who don’t have jobs and we managed to find the printers and specialised people to man the press. The next challenge was to find the editorial people and production people, people in accounts, sales and in distribution… We have had a core staff of about 12 people, looking at layouts and design for the newspaper, and also looking around in the market to see who’s available and who’s not available. We own our own distribution company – that’s the advantage that we have. One thing that 20 years in this business has taught me is that in African countries, it’s important that you control your own printing and distribution if you are to be a serious player… Click here to read the rest of the interview at Bizcommunity.

You might have sprung the cash to go see two or three live games during the tournament but most of us caught the action on the telly in our own homes or at pubs and fan parks. Which is why Sunday’s world cup final – the peculiar heavy-breathing world feed commentator John Helm aside – between Spain and the Netherlands broke broadcasting records around the globe. Among them:

* 700-million people watched the game globally, according to FIFA, which is more than the 600 million who watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
* A record average of 16-million people in Spain watched the game on the three channels broadcasting the match in the country.
* In the UK, the BBC’s audience was million, compared with 3.3 million for ITV – the state broadcaster’s biggest audience for a world cup final since France 1998.
* Even in the US, where football is viewed largely as a game for girls, 24 million people watched the final – a record audience for the broadcast of a soccer game in the country.

It would make Arthur C Clarke proud and here in South Africa we’re likely to produce record-breakers, too, although the finalised TAMS numbers for the Spain-Netherlands clash from the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) were not available at the time of writing. In-home figures for the two semifinals, however, show that 10.344 million South Africans watched the Uruguay-Netherlands game and 10.279 million watched the Germany-Spain match.

Likewise, the numbers for the final at DStv’s SuperSport – which held the exclusive pay-TV rights for the world cup for Africa – are being finalised, but it looks like it’s shaping up to be a best-ever: 1.433 million households, not taking into account out-of-home viewers. Clinton van der Berg, SuperSport International’s communications manager, says this would put the South African audience for the world cup final higher than the recent Super14 rugby final in Soweto (1.299 million households) and the South Africa-Mexico opening World Cup game (1.247 million).

According to SAARF TAMS figures, 10.15 million South Africans watched the crucial South Africa-Uruguay match in which we were exited from the tournament, while 10.06 million caught the SA-Mexico game and then 9.5 million of us tuned in to support the last African team standing, Ghana, when it played Uruguay in the knockout phase.

Incredible as these figures are, one wonders if it has translated into lots of lovely lolly in advertising revenue. Was this the media bonanza many were hoping for? Independent media planner (and football fan of note) Gordon Muller thinks not. The SABC ad rates were prohibitively high for many advertisers, he says, and the broadcast rights came at a pretty penny. He believes outdoor advertising firms and those not having to pay for media rights, such as newspapers, scored the most out of this world cup… Click here to read the full column at Bizcommunity.

UPDATE: Since the writing of this column, Saarf released the TAMS stats (compiled by Nielsen) for the Spain-Netherlands final:

Johannesburg, July, 14 2010 – As 11 059 000 South Africans – some 33.1% of the nation* – sat down to watch the final of Africa’s first FIFA World Cup on television, 1 883 000 Irish people did the same, topping the list for reach of population with 45.7%.

Possibly buoyed by their team’s great start to the tournament, 39 202 000 Americans – over 13% – topped the list of sheer numbers watching the final, with Italian supporters coming in second at 24 697 000 – more than 43% of that country’s population. Mexicans numbered 16 131 000 viewers (31.8% reach), taking third place for individual supporters watching TV.

With a slightly higher reach of 43.8%, Swedish numbers translated to 3 948 000 viewers, and 3 966 000 Hungarians also lent their support to the spectacle.

Nielsen says some 14 421 000 Indonesians (29.1%) also had the TV tuned to see who would be crowned world champions and Croatians, too, were keen to see the final, with 1 748 000 or 42.3% of the population cheering a team on. Poland’s marginally lower reach of 42.1% translated to more individual viewers than Croatia, at 15 145 000.

Fans from Armenia and Moldova numbered 544 000 and 879 000 respectively; while Georgia and Azerbaijan transmitted the match to 467 000 and 905 000 respectively. With a large number of viewers throughout the competition, Thailand viewers numbered 8 654 000 for the final.

New Zealand’s 937 000 viewers comprised 23.4% of its population, while Australia’s 9.2% reach saw 1 371 000 fans watching. Nielsen reports that 3 159 000 South Koreans cheered the game, while just over half that number of Taiwanese football fans – 1 110 000 – did the same. Puerto Rico’s 877 000 viewers translates to 23.1% of its population and Cyprus’s 292 000 meant 38.5% of its people saw the final.

Across 30 countries, it’s estimated that 164 963 000 in-home viewers saw Spain defeat the Dutch by one goal to nil – and receive a hero’s welcome in Barcelona.

*Source: SAARF TAMS

A review of the city and province’s politicians over the past 15 years reads like the cast of characters in a Carl Hiaasen novel: the musical Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel who liked to lunch with Jurgen Harksen, Niel Barnard and his penchant for spy games and then lately we’ve had Ebrahim Rasool v Mcebisi Skwatsha and Helen Zille v Badih Chabaan.

The big Cape Argus expose.

This contested, murky battleground is a fascinating place to be a political journalist but, as we have seen recently, it is also a dangerous one. The Cape Argus gobsmacked us at the end of June with revelations that Ashley Smith, a reporter for the Argus until he resigned amid a disciplinary enquiry in April 2006, had confessed in an affidavit to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) that he acted as a spindoctor for Rasool, then the Western Cape premier.

Smith told the newspaper he and Joseph Aranes  – then political editor of the paper and who has since resigned from the Argus – used their positions to help Rasool in his campaign against political rivals within the ANC. He also claimed and that the two received money from a public relations company that obtained provincial government contracts. Click here to read the Argus’s remarkable  expose of its former political reporter’s confession and here to read the paper’s front-page editorial that accompanied the story.

Rumours of this skullduggery had been bubbling around for quite some time and the Argus itself first came across the allegations five years ago when members of the Western Cape ANC claimed that two of the paper’s staff members were secretly being paid to write news articles that were favourable to Rasool. Click here to read the Argus’s story run on page 15 of the paper on the same day about the sequence of events over the five years and their attempts to nail down the allegations.

The Argus’s  package made for shocking and utterly compelling reading. If true, this is a serious breach of journalistic ethics and a terminal abuse of the public’s trust in journalism. Not since former City Press editor Vusi Mona, now a spindoctor in the presidency, emerged as a chief player in a bribery scandal in a Mpumalanga court case last year, have we had such skandaal in Media Land.

But I think everyone is agreed that the Argus, which is owned by Independent Newspapers,  played this exactly right. Most hacks – whether they be junior reporters or editors – find that if they apologise sincerely when things go wrong or mistakes are made that the readers are, in fact, quite forgiving.

Under the astute and ethical leadership of Chris Whitfield, a former editor of both the Cape Times and Argus and now editor-in-chief of  both papers plus the Weekend Argus and Daily Voice, the Argus played open cards with its readers to a remarkable degree. The cynical among us might say they had to ‘fess up before another paper got hold of it. In fact, the Mail & Guardian had a stab at it last year based on a set of tape recordings involving Rasool’s successor, Lynne Brown.  Whitfield, however, felt the M&G story – which alleged Argus reporters were being paid cash in brown envelopes –  was on shaky ground factually and the M&G’s ombudsman agreed. (Incidentally, payments of this kind did not come up in Smith’s confession.)

It is clear from the Argus’s own tale of how they finally got to the bottom of the allegations that they made every effort over five years to pursue it and lay their hands on actual evidence of wrong-doing. And in fact, Whitfield told me this week that senior reporter Murray Williams, who authored Wednesday’s front-page story, was put on this investigation six months ago…CLICK HERE TO READ THE INTERVIEW WITH WHITFIELD AT MY REGULAR COLUMN SPOT AT JOURNALISM.CO.ZA

Lord, but “Ludwig” — that bizarre little animated egg set to Beethoven’s music — used to bore me to tears when I was a kid and waiting for what little they had for kids on SABC to get a move on already to “Bagpuss” and “Senor Onion”! But look at it now and it’s really clever and charming. Click here to find out more about the British-made animated series by a Czech father-and-son team. It was clearly one of those animation ideas conceived by an adult with the intention of injecting a bit of culture into the rabid youf. Takes you back though… and if anyone stumbles across Senor Onion and Mees Tomato on YouTube, please let me know.

Need we say more. I think I can speak for all our countrymen when I say we wouldn’t have minded if Parreira had decked Domenech.

I think this is really fun and well worth the effort for what will prove to be a cooker of a game this afternoon. I’m sure Durbs is pumping with excitement today and packed with passionate Portuguese and Brazilian fans. So well done to The Mercury and I know they put a lot of planning into this. They sent out a press release about their plans for World Cup coverage almost a month ago. Here’s an excerpt about their thinking behind this campaign:

“KZN’s got a ‘dream draw’,” says The Mercury Editor, Angela Quintal. “Five of the world’s top soccer nations with the best fans are playing in Durban – giving The Mercury a strong dose of ‘soccer fever’ and an abundance of rich content on which to draw.

“Spain, Brazil, Netherlands, Portugal and Germany are playing first round matches at our magnificent Moses Mabhida stadium. Nigeria’s Super Eagles may also spring a surprise.

And, of course, we’ve got the group’s hottest ticket – Portugal v. Brazil -on June 25. Excitement around the clash of these two Portuguese-speaking soccer giants is already high, tickets are scarce and, with Category 1 seats to give away,
The Mercury has a promotional coup.

“In addition to strong local support, Durban is going to be flooded with Portuguese and Brazilian fans and a large contingent of journalists feeding the soccer-crazy fans back home,” says Quintal. “I don’t want to give too much away, but our edition on the day of the match is going to be a real celebration – for both English and Portuguese readers.
There’s a vibrant Portuguese community in Durban and we’ve had fantastic support from them,” says Quintal.

“We’ve uncovered some fascinating links between our countries  – for example, the celebrated nineteenth-century Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, had his first poem published in The Mercury in the 1800s. There are numerous
soccer players, coaches and team links we’ll be investigating and, for a bit of fun, we’ll be weighing up the talent on Durban’s beaches against that spotted on the beaches of Ipanema,” says Quintal.

Click here to go to design guru Charles Apple’s blog, on which he’s done a very cool post on The Mercury’s special Portuguese wrap around.

And here’s The Mercury’s own story about it.