RUN, BROTHER, RUN by Nola Turkington and Gillian Mathew (Human & Rousseau)
Two young township boys, Sizwe and Thando, are inspired by the Comrades’ Marathon, and decide to organise their own fun run, with the unexpected help of their local ultra-marathon hero, Vuyo. This is the simple, lighthearted story of their efforts.
Gillian Mathew has illustrated the book with black and white ink drawings with the minimum amount of detail, but full of movement and humour. Unfortunately the style of writing is not as lively as the illustrations. It tends to be wordy and plodding and this makes the story slow moving at the beginning.
The characters are believable and amusing. They all belong very comfortably in the book’s township setting. This is not a particularly memorable book, but it is enjoyable. Suitable for nine or 10-year-olds.
THE MEALIE-COB DOLL by Marianna Brandt; illustrated by Samantha van Riet (Tafelberg)
The Mealie-Cob Doll was originally written in Afrikaans and is translated into English by Darrel Bristow-Bovey. The heroine, Matilda, lives with her mother and grandmother. They eke out a living selling roasted mealies at a bus-stop stall and doing some dressmaking. The story centres on an art competition in which Matilda takes part.
The plot is predictable and the writing style mundane. The charm of the book lies in the authentically drawn characters.
The illustrations are delightful ink drawings, showing interesting, animated characters. Their individual personalities and moods are clearly seen. Suitable for nine or 10-year-old girls.
SCRUFFY DOG TALES: AN EXCITING DAY FOR SCRUFFY by Maureen Mary Oates (Minerva)
Scruffy is a Lakeland terrier puppy and this little book tells the story of his first day with his new owner, Charlotte. She is a nine-year-old girl who is given the puppy as a birthday present.
The plot is loosely constructed and episodic. The most exciting part is when Scruffy chases a snake and falls down a cliff, and this occurs in the middle of the book.
The three children in the story do not emerge as real characters. There is very little in either the text or the illustrations to give them individual personalities.
An eight-year-old should be able to read this book, but it can be read aloud to a much younger child.
@A new dimension of journalism
Stop the presses … well, not quite yet. The Internet is not about to kill newspapers, argues Simon Waldman
Once upon a time, when the Internet was young, the debate about the relative merits of old and new media was simple. Someone, normally referred to as either a geek or a guru (depending on which side of the fence you sat on), would say that print was dead. Someone else, normally referred to as a luddite, would say it wasn’t.
They would shout a lot, call upon everything from Caxton to quantum physics as evidence and then agree to disagree, realising that they would simply have to wait and see who was right. Five years on, the picture is considerably more complex.
The geek and the luddite were both right, and they were both wrong. Print is far from dead, but the number of people on the Net continues to soar. The Net might be overhyped and slightly underdeveloped, but it is not going to go away.
The result of all this is that the debate has moved on. It is no longer about whether, say, the Internet version of The Washington Post is better than the print version. For those who are prepared to invest time and effort in more than simply shovelling the contents of their paper online, the Net offers a wealth of editorial potential. Freed from the time and space limits of print, a new dimension of journalism becomes possible.
The “special report” or “Internet documentary” has become part of all major news sites (including the Mail & Guardian’s, with such volumous documents as the entire Truth and Reconciliation Report being made available). It is not just about words and pictures, but also about making the most of interactivity and reader’s contributions to create something that just could not exist in print.
But at the same time, print is cheap and portable. There are no download times and it tends to be considerably easier on the eye. In other words, both media have their virtues. You can always play the long-term prediction game about the future of newspapers, but you are likely to get it wrong simply by not anticipating a fundamental change. It happened to the strategists at Daimler Benz in the last century who predicted that there would only ever be one million cars in the world because only one million people could afford to keep chauffeurs.
Again the other old squabble, about damaging sales by giving the contents of your paper away online, has taken something of a back seat. After four years of free online newspapers, there is no real proof of sales being hit because of Internet distribution. If anything, it has allowed newspapers to reach a much greater global audience.
The real debate, however, is whether traditional media companies really have the ability to cut it in this new media when there are younger, faster and more clearly focused companies taking them on.
Companies that didn’t exist five years ago, such as Yahoo or Netscape, have now become many people’s first call for news. According to research from Jupiter Communications, 40% of United States Net users now get their online news from Internet directories or search engines, where wire stories are pumped out 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The best example of this is Yahoo!’s Full Coverage,
, which takes a mix of Reuters feeds and links to other sites to provide a stunningly useful resource. Yahoo!’s United Kingdom traffic, incidentally, is around 60-million pages a month – approximately the same as all the UK newspaper sites’ traffic added together.
At the same time, a new mutant form of journalism, where fact meets rumour, has emerged. Matt Drudge, , broke the biggest story of last year, while Newsweek sat on it. Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool News, , gives his audiences reviews of films before a traditional film critic has been allowed anywhere near them – he gets his information from “spies” who go to test screenings.
Both these online reporters have made mistakes and enemies, but have somehow kept their reputations intact. The Dallas Morning News, however, still has egg on its face from trying to out-Drudge Drudge.
Early last year it posted a story on its site claiming that Kenneth Starr had found a Secret Service agent who had seen Bill Clinton in a compromising position with Monica Lewinsky. The story was false. It was removed from the site four hours later, and replaced by a humble retraction; not before dozens of other news sources had picked up on the story.
It is not just print whose frailties are exposed by the net. Radio stations get excited because they have been able to broadcast their output across the Net. But Spinner.com, , offers hundreds of different music channels ranging from opera to trip hop. You choose whichever you want and it comes down through your computer, simply telling you what’s playing and letting you buy the CD at the click of a button.
Spinner.com can open and close channels as they please; depending on what works, not on whether or not the Radio Authority thinks it’s a good idea. In other words, newspapers, television stations and radio stations have stopped being the only outlet for news and rumour.
Ten years ago, the closest the public came to wire copy was watching football results ticker on Grandstand, but now Reuters and Associated Press have their own sites and their headlines are splattered across the Net.
Likewise, 10 years ago Matt Drudge might have heard the Lewinsky story, but what could he have done about it? Told a few friends over a drink? The Net gave him an instant global audience.
Traditional media companies have two major advantages when it comes to the Net; the fact that people already know who they are, and the sheer volume of content and content creators at their disposal. When the Net first emerged, many thought these two facts alone would be enough to carry them through. Almost without exception, however, they have come across two problems.
First, the physical process of getting that content online is hellishly difficult. Behind the glamorous, paradigm-busting bravado of new media lies an exhausting world of temperamental production systems, unstable technology and endless hours spent swearing at computers. And it eats up manpower – the number of staff employed in new media offices is soaring. US newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and USA Today now employ more than 100 in their new media departments.
Second, and perhaps more important, are the organisational difficulties. This starts at the simplest of levels; such as how does a newspaper publisher which is completely geared to producing a print product daily suddenly start to operate in a medium where rolling news is the norm. It then goes all the way up to issues of corporate structures which seem ungainly, to say the least, when transferred to the Net.
The BBC’s online strategy, initially split three ways between news, a commercial venture – Beeb.com funded by computer company ICL – and the straight BBC Online (that is, everything else). This no doubt made sense in a McKinsey consultant’s organisational chart, but was simply baffling when applied to the real world. In practice, it resulted in such gems as producing three unconnected World Cup sites, with meetings held between departments over which site had the right to publish a match report.
It has to be said that the BBC is in the process of improving much of this, and they can at least claim a news site to be proud of; thanks partly to a staff of more than 100 journalists and a budget which most new media operations could only ever dream about.
The commercial sector has problems all of its own. The website for ITN, the news arm of Britain’s Independent Television, , could probably treble its traffic if it were simply allowed to put its address at the end of News At Ten. But because of the structure of ITV, they are not allowed to. Instead, the ITV companies are still trying to work out whether they should flag the network’s not very impressive site, , or the individual companies should flag their own sites, where they have them.
The result of all this is that traditional media have found they can’t suddenly trundle on to the Net and find themselves in charge simply because of who they are. They have two basic options: either you tackle the problems – do something radical and try to produce the very best for the medium – or you fudge it and hope the problems will go away (they won’t). There used to be a third option – ignore the Internet completely in the hope that it will go away. That one doesn’t exist any more.
The Mail & Guardian runs an independent daily online newspaper, the Daily Mail & Guardian at
@Shopping for convenience
Roger Cowe
A million shoppers used the Internet to buy products worth a total of more than 400-million last year, more than double the number in 1997, and the figure is likely to double in the next six months.
But Verdict Research, which publishes these figures, says the Internet still accounts for only a tiny part of Britain’s shopping bill and, even at today’s rates of growth, the Internet will account for only 2,5% of all retail sales by 2003.
Richard Hyman, Verdict’s chair, says: “It does represent meteoric growth but there is still a long way to go. You shouldn’t expect a significant change in life as we know it in the next few years.”
The growth of Net retailers such as the bookseller Amazon has given a high profile to electronic commerce.
Verdict says the typical Net shopper has changed radically in profile over the past year. It estimates that many younger e-shoppers have been put off by the unsophisticated nature of most websites.
As a result, Verdict says, there has been a big drop in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds shopping on the Net, and a growing number of shoppers aged older than 45.
This should be good news for retailers because older shoppers’ tastes are more mainstream, opening up the possibility of mass- market selling over the Net.
When most retailers are on the Net, it will be easier to shop around for the best price. But today’s e-shoppers are less interested in price than convenience. More than a third of them said they would not have bought the product if it had not been available online. Speed of response and delivery were more important to them than price.
Hyman said easier comparisons might drive down prices, but even the most successful Net stores had yet to make a profit and the present level of discounting might not be sustainable.
Verdict believes books, computer software and music are ideal products for Web sales, and forecasts that as much as 40% of sales in these categories could be via the Internet by the year 2003. But it says clothing will account for the biggest online product sales, even though only 5% of clothes are sold via the Net.