It probably wasn’t the intention, but in late May the Business Day ran a short piece that betrayed a fairly begrudging respect for a formidable rival. Commenting on why reserve bank governor Tito Mboweni still refuses to be interviewed by Moneyweb’s founder and chairman Alec Hogg, the Johnnic daily reminded readers how a few years back, when Hogg had a business show on Radio 702, he devoted an hour to ‘listing Mboweni’s shortcomings.” According to the piece, the show prompted Mboweni to shut the gates on Hogg until a retraction of equal duration was broadcast. ‘The black mark moved with Hogg to Classic FM,” Business Day continued, ‘and Mboweni [said] that he intended giving e.TV the same ultimatum now that Hogg had a slot there.”
Predictably, before close of business on the day the piece was published a strong header appeared on the Moneyweb homepage. ‘Tito attacks Moneyweb founder” shouted down all else the website had on offer at the time. A click-through to the body revealed the full Business Day item, followed by a response from Hogg that said of Mboweni: ‘While his elephantine memory is clearly capable of carrying resentments, it is a little fuzzy on the details.” As Hogg recalled it, there was no hour-long hatchet job. He suggested instead that Mboweni’s ire was raised by a critical question: how can the necessary independence of the reserve bank be upheld in the face of the political appointment of its governor? (Mboweni, of course, had previously been Minister of Labour). Hogg then ended his response to Business Day thus: ‘Mr. Mboweni steadfastly refuses my offers of an olive branch. Your reporting suggests this is because he still enjoys using his non-relationship with Moneyweb as a threat to other would-be critics in the media. So be it.”
On its simplest level the three-way exchange was a fascinating read – and generated the inevitable list of dogmatic opinions on Moneyweb’s comment forum – but, in terms of Hogg’s persona, it was also illustrative of something more enduring. It showed that the award-winning editorial pro doesn’t back away from a conflict, especially when his journalistic reputation is at stake. And it showed that while some big names are less than keen to be at the receiving end of one of his interviews, he makes every effort to play fair.
There’s an anecdote that further demonstrates the former point, taken from the early ’90s when Hogg did a short stint at the SABC (initially as economics editor of television and radio and later as head of news input for television). ‘The National Party was just getting its hands off [the corporation],” says Hogg, ‘and I conducted an interview with Jay Naidoo. I got a letter from the chairman of the board stating that if I ever dared to bring a communist on television again, I would be fired. It was too late, and I told him to get stuffed.”
As for the latter point, Hogg reveals that his belief in evenhandedness was strengthened by two-and-a-half years as group communications manager and executive committee member at ABSA, then (mid ’90s) the largest banking group on the African continent. ‘ABSA showed me that journalists are taught to be very cynical,” he says. ‘It shocked me how few are balanced. There were few senior journalists I could take to task – they would not listen to the other side of the story.”
But such insight wasn’t all Hogg took from the ABSA experience. When he left the bank in 1996 and cashed in his share options, he finally had the capital to ‘re-open” his own shop.
Hogg is an embodiment of the axiom, applicable to any irrepressible entrepreneur, that if you dig deep enough in the past you’ll find an experimental business venture or two behind ‘the big one’. It seems that in 1986, fresh from a series of senior editorial positions at The Star, Sunday Times, Rand Daily Mail and Finance Week, he launched a financial news agency called Alec Hogg & Associates. When a restraint of trade frustrated those plans, he had another passion ready for print and in 1988 created Racing Digest, South Africa’s first weekly horseracing magazine.
The print foray, which lasted until Hogg sold out to Caxton three years down the road, was evidently a steep learning curve. ‘[Racing Digest] taught me about this business called publishing,” Hogg says. ‘The major problems are printing and distribution.”
Still, as would be repeated per the ABSA digression, there was value to be had on top of the lesson. Caxton took on the assessed losses of Racing Digest three months before the bankers were done, and Hogg kept twenty percent of the title for himself. He also continued running the ‘tipping lines’ (an ‘087’ number he had launched for punters off the back of the publication), which earned him three times his monthly salary at the SABC.
The tipping line income would again come in handy when Hogg threw the cash from those abovementioned share options into a fledgling Internet project. In 1996 Hogg saw the net, which was just starting to gain traction, as an answer to the crippling production costs he had been forced to deal with in print. Initially sending a column called Boardroom Talk off to South African Internet pioneer Kevin Davies – who posted it on Woza – he quickly recognised the potential for his own site. Interestingly, it was Davies (currently business editor at yet-to-be-launched ThisDay) who coined the term ‘Moneyweb’, and according to Hogg the two could’ve been partners.
In its earliest years, Moneyweb’s content was primarily made up of transcripts from the radio show Hogg was hosting on SAFM. Then in 1998 he moved the show to 702, a station he felt would give him access to South Africa’s best business interviews, having negotiated a deal with the station manager for copyright of the transcripts and a share of the revenue. The arrangement worked incredibly well for a while, and in 1999 Moneyweb was listed on the JSE, but a fall-out with Primedia (702’s holding company) over which was the bigger brand – and therefore who was entitled to what slice of the cake – led to Hogg leaving the station in 2000.
Today Moneyweb has an editorial compliment of over twenty journalists. Although radio transcripts make up only a minor part of the site’s exclusive financial content, the company holds just under twenty percent equity in Classic FM – a station whose listenership and revenue has been massively boosted by Hogg’s 6 to 7pm weekday slot. Moneyweb has also recently signed deals with e.TV news, where Hogg is business editor, and the Citizen, which runs daily business pages under the brand.
Ever the entrepreneur, Hogg says: ‘We’re a financial media content house, but if an asset comes along at a low price, we will look at it.”
In that sense, there’ll be plenty to keep Hogg occupied while he waits to get Mboweni back into the hot seat.