Marthali Brand
The Internet is set to be the next advertising goldmine, if the number of online South African newspapers is anything to go by. A search for newspapers on the South Africa Online search engine gives more than 30 hits, including obscure publications like Die Padda and Colin’s Family Focus.
But the really serious media players are also very much in evidence, such as Times Media Limited (TML), Independent Newspapers, Nasionale Pers and the joint Mail & Guardian/ M-Web electronic newspaper called the em&g.
At TML’s bland homepage (www.tml.co.za) – which is still under construction – you can access Business Day, Financial Mail, Business Times, Netassets and Out There magazine. Undoubtedly the best of these is the Business Day site at www.bday.co.za.
This is one of the few media websites that was obviously designed specifically for the Internet, and isn’t just an electronic extension of the print version of the newspaper. The front page loads quickly because it contains so few graphics, resulting in an uncluttered easily navigable site.
The scroll – from the top of the page, the Business Day masthead and a cheery, good-morning sun, past the table of economic indicators, to the bottom, with a cup of steaming coffee – is just long enough to be interesting, but not so long that you get los t along the way.
The Business Day online’s index deserves special mention. A sub-menu pops up when you touch each of the individual subjects. Business Day’s designers obviously understand the potential uses of hypertext. Under the ”archive” heading, for instance, you’ll find a handy section of terms and comments; a list of definitions for nasty concepts like ”capital gain” and ”marginal tax rate”.
Another point in their favour is that each publication in the TML stable has its own website and is not just another page within the big site. This means that the individual publications will be accessible even if gremlins have put the home site out of a ction.
This is not the case with Independent Online. Although it may seem as if publications like The Star (www.star.co.za) and The Sunday Independent (www.sunday.co.za) have their own websites, these sites are only front pages. Any attempt to access the news o f the day, the archives or any other subject on the menu, takes you to the home site at Independent Online – whose address, for some obscure reaso n, is www.inc.co.za.
I spent a whole weekend trying to access The Star, to no avail, because Independent Online was off-line. When you can get into Independent Online, the site is quite professionally put together. Unfortunately, the page opens quite slowly because the daily cartoon takes a long time to load. They should also get rid of the chunk of text at the bottom of the page and replace it with a simple index.
The site has a comprehensive search facility which, unfortunately, takes a while to get used to. But once you’ve read through all the explanations, you can find almost anything you want with the click of a button.
The site provides access to The Star, Cape Argus, Sunday Life, Higher Education Review and Personal Finance.
The media website which provides access to the largest number of publications, however, is Nasweb, the online version of Nasionale Pers (www.naspers.co.za). Nasweb is a pleasure to navigate and has links to all the Naspers newspapers, magazines and publi shers. It is available in Afrikaans and English.
The diamond in Naspers’s online crown is eBeeld, the electronic version of Johannesburg’s Afrikaans daily. Once again, eBeeld (www.ebeeld.com) has its own site, with the archive the only index-entry that is linked to the Naspers homepage. The blurb at th e top declares the site bilingual, but I have yet to find the link to the Afrikaans version on any of eBeeld’s pages. However, the English version is professionally presented and easy to use.
Also at Naspers is a link to South Africa’s most successful online community media centre, the Helderberg Virtual Village (www.helderberg.com). Two newspapers, the District Mail and Helderberg Mail, operate from this site. Although the design of the page leaves much to be desired, Helderberg should be complimented on the fact that it is the only commercially successful community website in South A
frica.
The site provides some services that only a community newspaper can provide – a set of maps, lists of schools and churches in the area, telephone numbers of the local emergency and community services and a diary of events for the next few weeks.
But the best media website on the Net is still the em&g (at www.mg.co.za). The front page is short and sweet, with easy links to the latest news and all the features em&g offers it readers, including the popular Madam &Eve homepage.
The design of the site is a bit outdated, which is to be expected, since the em&g is the oldest South African newspaper on the Web. But artistic considerations aside, it is still the most user-friendly media site available.
And it seems that Web-users appreciate this: according to independently audited figures released in February, the em&g is still South Africa’s largest online news service, with more than 800 000 page accesses on average per month. This is more than four times the number of page accesses of any other South African online news service.
A list of South African online newspapers can be found at: www.southafrica.co.za/news/newspapers.html