The Mail & Guardian, the most “wired” newspaper in Africa, has launched a new media division to strengthen its electronic publishing programme.
The new division, eM&G, will be focused on expanding the M&G’s Internet profile, developing specialised electronic services to harness the publishing opportunities presented by the information
The M&G has committed two of its most senior staffers to this division — director and former co-editor Irwin Manoim and special projects director Bruce Cohen.
Manoim, a respected Pringle Award winner and pioneer of desktop publishing in South Africa, is also editor of the M&G’s acclaimed computer supplement PC Review.
Cohen is one of South Africa’s leading Internet publishing experts, who brought the M&G on-line in March 1994 — making it the first newspaper in Africa on the Internet. He founded MisaNet, an Internet news service and press freedom network linking together the independent media in the sub-continent under the auspices of the Windhoek-based Media Institute of Southern Africa. He has presented papers on Internet publishing at several conferences locally and internationally. He writes the Mail’s weekly Internet column Web Feet.
The M&G’s World Wide Web on the Interent site was recently selected as among the top five percent of all Internet web sites by Point Surveys in the USA.
The M&G’s Internet services currently include:
* An electronic version of the paper delivered every Friday to Internet subscribers worldwide;
* The Mail & Guardian Internet archive — a fully searchable database of all stories published since July
* PC Review Online, a value-added World Wide Web version of the M&G’s popular PC Review supplement.
* An online version of the M&G weekly entertainment
* The M&G Forum, a lively Internet discussion forum on topical South African issues, enhanced this week by the addition of a number of new WWW forums on computing, eco-tourism and marketing.
“We are planning substantial enhancements to existing services as well as a wide range of new services,” says Cohen. “The core strength of the Mail & Guardian — its editorial credibility and quality — will be the foundation of our electronic services. We aim to deliver to the rapidly increasing local — and international — Internet community world-class interactive electronic products and services of real
A key feature of the M&G’s Internet service will be its interactivity with the “hard-copy” version of the paper. “We’ll be constantly enhancing the editorial coverage of the paper with additional information, including original source material, on our Interent site,” says Cohen.