Readers of the Electronic Mail & Guardian had to look twice last Friday when they discovered that their favourite on-line newspaper had mysteriously been rebaptised the Daily Mail & Guardian.
The name Daily Mail & Guardian is a smidgen less of a mouthful than Electronic Mail & Guardian, whose 23 letters take two breaths to pronounce, and when written out, barely squeeze on to a business card.
But that wasn’t the reason for the change. It’s a belated recognition of something that’s been obvious to our regular readers for years: that the online version of the Mail & Guardian, which began life as a faithful clone of the print edition, has long been moving in a different direction.
Actually, we didn’t change the name for the benefit of our regular readers. We changed it for the benefit of our non- readers, the M&G faithfuls who say: “Why should I read the M&G on the Internet when I read it in bed every Friday night?”
The change of name is a hint: the Internet is a very different medium to print. And the Daily Mail & Guardian’s journalism is a distant relative to M&G journalism.
An M&G journalist will spend a week thinking about the implications of an event, then another couple of days crafting the first paragraph, and finally file a thousand words of sweated toil, usually some hours after deadline.
A Daily Mail & Guardian journalist is expected to finish writing the story when the event has barely begun, then rewrite it all over before it has progressed much further, then rewrite it all over again the moment it ends. If Daily Mail & Guardian journalists insist on thinking, well, that’s the kind of thing they can do when they go home.
Is this all the Daily Mail & Guardian can offer, you may ask: superficial journalism? Well yes, that’s what we’re most proud of, but there’s a lot more. Here’s a mere sampling:
l You like Madam & Eve? Well, we offer a new strip every day. Not to mention a year’s worth of cartoons to browse through, and Madam & Eve postcards to e- mail to your pals.
l Debate? As you read this, there are scores of arguments waging in different forums on our site as readers here and abroad, black and white, far left and far right, queer and homophobic, slug it out.
l We have a listing for every movie, play, concert or exhibition, updated every day. And the real magic is: once you’ve made your choice, you press a button and book your seat.
l We have an education site, a travel site, a computer games site, a gays- only site, an African news site, an Internet news site, a book reviews archive, and of course, news, business, market reports, sports and something that would never grace the pages of the M&G: the weather.
l The nice thing about the Internet is that we never run out of space. So you can read David Beresford’s dissection of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report … you can even read the whole damn 3 000-page report.
l Finally, and this is the heart of the matter, we have the M&G. Not only this week’s edition but last week’s and the week before, all the way back to early 1994. The difference is that it’s all linked together, so when you read this week’s skande from Mungo Soggot, we’ve also dug up every related story he’s published on the same topic.
Now you know what we’ve been doing behind your back for several years. And now you know why we’ve changed the name to signal a product which is very different … and yet very much the same M&G, all day, every day and up to date.