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.

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.

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.

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.

For a sober judge, Hlophe sure is a riot.  There’s never a dull moment and he’s the guy I want at my party.

So pass the canapes and here’s the latest:

Business Day has got hold of a letter Hlophe has sent to Chief Justice Pius Langa blaming the  Mail & Guardian for the “malicious and despicable” act of making a story up.  In the story, Hlophe was quoted as saying he had refused to shake Langa’s hand after a Judicial Service Commission interview two weeks ago because “I’m not going to shake a white man’s hand”.

Read the Business Day story here and here’s the letter. While we’re at it, I’d like to point out to the Biz Day tecchies that it’s quite possible to insert a link into a story. Just hit the “insert a link” button rather than making the user copy and paste the url into their browsers.

The M&G is sticking to its story and here’s the original article on Hlophe by Sello S Alcock. You malicious and despicable people, you, who also happen to have a reputation for fearless and accurate reporting.  You’re invited to my party too and the white guy who runs the paper — I’ll even shake your hand.

He takes isue with a recent Mangcu’s column for Business Day, in which Mangcu said cartoonsit Zapiro and Vrye Weekblad founder Max du Prees are racist. It’s vintage Bullard — amusing and cutting — and sure to get Xolela ranting so this could be a lot of fun. This is what Bullard has to say about his fellow columnist:

For Mangcu is an intellectual as he tirelessly reminds us every week. He neglects to mention that he received a generous donation of shares from Mr Tokyo Sexwale part of which he turned into a Porsche Cayenne. This allows him the leisure time to loaf around the Seattle Coffee shop in Hyde Park looking…..er intellectual.

And then he leaps to Zapiro and Du Preez’s defence with a couple of sideswipes as he goes, especially for Max, whom he refers to as:

…bitter and a tad boring but he certainly isn’t racist. He just has that unfortunate colonial habit of patronizing the darkies and talking down to them as though they were children.

"With you, the force may be."

I bet Du Preez is already sharpening his pen.I hear Bullard wrote a pice for the Sentinel over the weekend about the Sunday Times  (remember that gis juicly court case against the paper is set down for June 22 though the word is that the Crimes may settle on the steps of the court).  Bullard apparently took more than a few potshots at editor Mondli Makhanya but it was taken down as it was too defamatory.

I’m afraid I couldn’t locate Mangcu’s column on Business Day’s website, which has been a new look today. My only beef is that they’ve forgtiten to link to The Weekender, which, if you’re outside Joburg, Cape Town and Durban, you can’t lay your hands on in print form. However, the good news they’ve finally added RSS feeds which means I can remove them from my favourites folder labelled: “The plonkers without RSS feeds”.

1. It’s all about analysing the cabinet today. Of the big mainstream media websites, Business Day has the most comprehensive analysis. It’s main story focuses on the choice of trade unionist Ebrahim Patel to head the Department of Economic Development. Patel will be at the centre of economic policy creation, says Business Day, possible even eclipsing the role traditionally played by the finance minister. Read the full story here and clicks to further analysis.

2. The Times also has quite a bit of analysis and has done something a little different, with an audio clip of their well informed political editor Sthembiso Msomi dissecting the cabinet. Click here to go to the audio clip.

3. If IOL and News24 have analysis, they’re hiding their light under a bushel because I couldn’t spot it. IOL, however, does have an inauguration story from the left field: about the Durban businessman who made the news last week for allegedly attempting to bribe an official to get a better seat at the inauguration. Not to be deterred, he threw a lavish bash in honour of JZ last night that went on into the wee hours. Click here for the full story. And there I was watching Tom & Jerry 2 with my four-year-old. Clearly, I’m not moving in the right circles.

4. If, like me you were out hunting down a Mother’s Day present on Saturday morning and you missed the inauguration on TV, click here to read the full speech. Seems like a pretty good speech to me and sending out all the right signals. We’ll see if JZ and the cabinet can live up to it.

5. And on the first lady issue, 5fm DJ has this to say over on his blog:

Zizakele “Makhumalo” Zuma is our first lady.
She was introduced to the nation on Saturday.
The other two wives don’t mind, after a compromise.
The one wife is in charge of the PVR, and wife number three has first dibs on all the gifts.

Very witty, Wilde. Click here to go to his blog.

Word on the grapevine says about 15 people will have to go and that would also be a damn shame. For a long time the paper has teatered between making a tidy little profit and breaking even and, under editor Peter Bruce, it really is an excellent paper, with fine analysis and often beating The Star and The Times on the big breaking stories of the day.

I’ve worked at Business Day and can honestly say it is one of the most pleasant papers to work for in South Africa. It’s a calm, colleagual, team-driven newsroom and attracts journalists with integrity and experience. Retrenchment processes must start by law with a voluntary phase and that usually means that experienced people who can find work easily elsewhere take the gap. Because it’s a business publication, these people will be able to find work in the corporate world, and it would be sad to lose them to journalism.

Retrenchments have hit almost every paper and media group in SA so I suppose the big question is when will it come to the Avusa-owned Sunday Times. I can’t imagine they will be able to avoid it — especially with The Times’s newspaper sales still so low and everybody taking a hit on ad revenue. I know that the editorial staff budget of the Sunday Times and Times is HUGE and the cost cutters would see easy pickings.

When I worked at the Sunday Times, us lowly hacks would joke about what we called the “helicopters” — middle managers with vague job titles who “hovered” around with nothing in particular to do — and there are quite a few of them. You can’t afford helicopters in lean times like these.

“There would have been some serious collateral damage. He probably would have destroyed half the block,” he said.

The policeman said the man had apparently got the device for a Halloween party in 2008, and had apparently forgotten to return it to the person he borrowed it from.

“At this stage we are trying to establish where the weapon came from, especially as it is not a grenade launcher that is used by the South African National Defence Force,” he said.

Read the full story here.

2. The National Prosecuting Authority are still deliberating whether the corruption and racketeering charges against ANC president Jacob Zuma should be dropped after a marathon session yesterday. An announcement is expected today. Read The Times story here.

3. However, IOL is bucking the trend among the news websites and not leading with the Zuma story. Instead they’re leading with an interesting story about a Joburg taxi tycoon accused of running a mafia-style operation, intimidating drivers and influencing police investigations. It’s a tad dodgy legally and, frankly, I’m surprised The Star has named the taxi boss though the Gauteng Transport Department confirmed it is investgating the accusations. The taxi boss, however, should have been given more space to comment and higher up in the story.  Read it here.

4. The Appeal  Court will deliver its judgment today on the dispute between Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe and 13 judges of the Constitutional Court. Read the Business Day story here.

5. The SABC’s failure to pay suppliers on time is hitting the bottom line of  independent production companies so they have formed the TV Industry Coalition to help with the national  broadcaster’s turnaround strategy. Read the Business Day story here.

2. Business Day also says that the NPA is expected to drop all charges against ANC president Jacob Zuma today that include corruption and racketeeing arising from the 2005 fraud and corrpution conviction of his former financial adviser Schabir Shaik. Click here.

3. And, yes, it does seem so as The Star reports that Zuma’s legal team missed a March 27 deadline to hand in documents to the Constitutional Court about the case. This, says the paper, could be because they already knew the charges would be dropped. Curious to say the least considering the NPA’s decision is only supposed to be communicated to Zuma’s lawyers today. Read The Star story here.

4. East Coast Radio says four million light bulbs were switched off during Saturday night’s Earth Hour, according to Eskom. Click here. I must admit I forgot as I was tucking into sesame chicken and a Johnny Walker Blue in a Chinese restaurant at the time.

5. Madonna continues her Mia Farrow streak in Malawi and was in court today in the capital, Lilongwe, to adopt a second Malawian child. Read the Hello story here.