More sense than rands: SA online journ comes into own

Some of this may well be the case in the US, where one 2009 study estimated there were as many people in the country earning a living as bloggers as there were lawyers or computer programmers: 452 000 of them, though, I'm sure many were wiped out in the recession.

Lone operators

Here in South Africa, you would be hard-pressed to name 100 successful professional bloggers in the sense that they are lone operators who actually make a living from it - (see South African and African blog aggregators Amatomu and Afrigator to get a sense of who's out there) - but I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that the quality of online journalism in this country has really come into its own in the past year.

I took a step back and surveyed the scene recently, when a British hack covering the 2010 FIFA World Cup told me that he thought South African websites such as www.football365.co.za were doing far better journalism than the traditional press. Of course, he was focused on sport but if you take a little jaunt around the SA web - from the likes of TechCentral and The Daily Maverick to Memeburn and NewsTime that are all start-ups of the past 18 months - you will find top-class writing packaged in a sophisticated manner that equals, if not betters, what you find in the traditional media.

And that's before you start looking at the more established niche new sites such as this one, Bizcommunity.com, MyBroadband, Moneyweb, ITWeb and Keo.co.za.

Can only really get better

I think SA's online denizens can be justly pleased with what's going on on the web at the moment. It's good stuff, and it can only really get better as many of these sites are run by experienced media people such as Duncan McLeod at TechCentral and Matthew Buckland at Memeburn.

Rather than lowering the tone of journalism, the small online operations have actually been very good for the trade and not least because they have provided a new market for SA's freelance journalists. In my experience, SA's news websites tend to pay generally better and more promptly than the traditional media.

Because they are small outfits the editors are more directly involved in payments, compared with the large media houses where section editors pass on invoices to accounts departments in the bowels of their buildings. The turnaround is also much quicker. Print magazines, for instance, will often only pay after publication which can be three months after delivery of copy.

Generally nicer

But mostly, I think, the difference is that the online world is generally nicer - it's smaller, more collegial and the ethos is one of sharing information and helping others out. D*ckheads and d**ses tend not to survive too long online as the community tends to avoid them.

And so more and more of the country's experienced journalists and thoughtful writers are to be found in new media, rather than old. The fact that veteran columnist David Bullard now works exclusively for online and attracted a sponsor, Cisco, for his column while he was at Moneyweb - probably a first in SA - tells you that the times, they are a-changing.

Maybe I'm caught up in the lure of zeitgeist here so I bounced my view off two of the smartest people I know on the web: McLeod, whose TechCentral is growing rather nicely after he went on his own when he left the Financial Mail last year and Buckland, a co-founder of the Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader before he headed up 24.com's innovation unit and left it about four months ago to start Memeburn.

"Some very exciting online content"

McLeod agrees with me, saying: "Generally speaking, the quality of journalism in print media in SA has declined over the years and there almost seems to have been an acceleration in that decline in the recent past, probably as a direct result of cost-cutting among editorial staff during the recession... I also agree that there is some very exciting online content at the moment. Daily Maverick is superb...

"To a certain extent, print is conceding the quality end of the market to the web. I think this is inevitable as readers go online. It's at the top end of the market where print publishers will feel the most pain from online."

Buckland, however, reckons: "Some of the newer online publications are still in start-up mode and waiting for their business model to settle but the potential is there for them to make a big impact. Online-only publications don't make as much advertising revenue as their print counterparts but have lighter cost structures and, therefore, strong potential profitability.

'Print a big employer, revenue generator'

"But I'd hesitate to frame this as a 'print vs online' discussion because print media - although under pressure - is a big employer and revenue generator. In contrast, there are only a handful of new, independent credible online-only publications."

So what, if anything, can traditional media learn from the online start-ups besides the value of paying journalists what they're worth and on time? Here's a few tips:

• That you needn't be so stuffy when it comes to language and grammar. Online tends to prefer a playful attitude to language that allows writers to find their natural voices and leads to more engaging writing.

• Successful websites tend to be suffused with their owners' personalities. The Daily Maverick is appealing because it is irreverent - and it carries this off so well because its owner, Branko Brkic, is irreverent too. Brkic is also not afraid to roll up his sleeves and edit copy, write headlines and captions. Flat management structures are a hallmark of start-ups but they can also work in more mature firms.

• New media such as Memeburn is mastering marketing their content through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook - something all media operations need to attend to. On average, the site gets between 60 and 200 tweets a day -not half bad for a four-month-old site. But, as Buckland, says the worst thing you can do is abuse your networks. "I tend to share information I find interesting and enjoy rather than 'market' that information," he says. "Since I started Memeburn I find this line has started to blur, which I find uncomfortable. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot."

Pitfalls

Of course, there are also pitfalls in the online arena. One that took me a while to get my head around was the chimera of chasing stats.

Because you can measure exactly what is being read on a site, the temptation is to shape your content in response to this. But shying away from less popular topics or sentiments may promise short-term gain but in the end the loyal, high-end readers will punish you for being so shallow - for basically not being yourself.

Online journalsim, it turns out, requires quite a lot of thought and certainly more sense than rands.