Back in 1994, Steve Outing — doyen of online media columnists — began assessing the internet’s meaning for newspapers. Reflecting on his early musings, he recently wrote: ”Geez, I feel old!”
Well said, fellow scribe! It has indeed taken many years to reach the point where, as you put it, there’s no longer cause to gripe about newspapers’ poor grasp of online.
Today, at last, there is a sea change. In a shift as big as that from dial-up to broadband, even the most diehard print traditionalists are starting to ”get it”.
It’s not yet time to crow ”told you so”. And it would be entirely incorrect to spout the provocation ”RIP print”. Instead, we should simply welcome the mindset change.
Evidence of new thinking in South Africa emerged last month at a meeting of local editors. Fresh from the World Editors’ Forum in Moscow, many spoke as if they had been to Damascus.
Thus were erstwhile dinosaurs now waxing loudly about podcasting and blogging. One even confessed to realising that colleagues doing online work were neither enemies nor aliens.
Reinforcing this buzz is the recent decision by Naspers to merge its web operations into 24.com. This new online destination aims to engage two-thirds of South Africans who use the web, and make money through advertising.
Behind 24.com is anticipated rapid growth of internet use in South Africa. Till now, it’s been the low numbers of online people — no matter that they were your advertising-attractive elite — that has kept online publishing the poor cousin of print.
Over-inflated hopes of success triggered the dot-com bomb six years ago. It caused drastic staff cutbacks in online media worldwide, including South Africa. Since then, most newspapers seem to have regarded the web as a marketing expense, rather than as serious publishing.
It’s not at all certain that the local online universe will indeed go big bang in the coming years — nor that online economics will indeed pump big-time. Nevertheless, it is in case this scenario materialises that South African publishers and editors seem now to have resolved they want to be ready.
Some have further to travel than others. Independent’s aggregator side (Iol.co.za) in recent years has been complemented by the company setting up title-branded websites (such as Star.co.za). But the company requires a strategy to run these outlets in synergy.
Naspers itself needs to assess how far to go with convergence. It’s unclear whether 24.com merges different online operations alone, or if, as one employee says, it will also lead to ”the integration of the traditional and the digital businesses”.
Convergence
All players could do well, however, to look at the experiment taking place at Grahamstown’s Grocott’s Mail. I chair the board of the paper, but credit for convergence there goes to Vincent Maher, head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, and editor of Grocott’s Online.
Maher has designed the Grocott’s site to exploit the internet as a medium. For example, a tracker compares your reading to that of other visitors and tells you the most-popular stories. And besides keeping you cognisant of your act of accessing the content, there are opportunities to interact and respond.
In short, the site is not your typical informational paradigm: even without offering blogging, it assumes there will be communication. It also has something that the paper does not: video stories that parallel content reworked from the print.
In fact, while sharing some content with its physical counterpart, it’s not actually an electronic newspaper, let alone a mere edition of the paper. As such it’s an animal that complements, rather than competes with, the newspaper.
In particular, with an eye to its main audience being campus-based and diaspora connectees, the product is highly selective about what it presents from the newspaper — and how it does so. The paper itself does a different job: serving mainly offline townspeople, who are a substantively different audience.
In effect, the two Grocott’s items are distinctly different offerings under a single brand. That the one came first and is (much) older does not make it the primary product.
Where the combined enterprise still comes up short is in the same realms as its big-city counterparts: poor cross-promotion, limited supplementary content and graphics-thin.
There is also still a way to go before print and web collaborate in the newsroom via integrated editorial planning. Instead, the website typically gets the paper’s content after it’s done … and vice versa.
So, the separate silo syndrome is still in place, meaning that opportunities to explore the richness of the total operation are being missed. Showing the way here, for the big players, is still in the future. But one thing that Outing and I have learned over long years of hucking newspapers about online: change takes time.
Still, one day Grocott’s people will think with both platforms in mind and jointly plan and execute their key stories from the start. When that happens, Mr Outing, join me in feeling rejuvenated.