[2009 trends]: the year of publishing dangerously

Our world is becoming more complicated and interlinked than ever before. China's appetite for steel is affecting the price of oranges and the failure of US mortgages is changing the price of petrol for the better.

We live in a world where knowledge is no longer a luxury. It is not possible to muddle your way through life ignorant of global politics or the domestic economy. Decisions about investment, about education, about health and about employment require an ever-greater understanding of political and social dynamics. The stakes are high and they will get higher as the global economic squeeze continues.

The catchphrase of the day is "platform agnostic". People want news and they want to decide when and how they get it. There is a generation that will remain loyal to print, but there is a new generation that has no such loyalty. Media companies should continue the fight to turn this new generation into newspaper readers, but they should prepare for the fact that they will only partially succeed.

Newspapers will remain strong in a country where the roll-out of the Internet remains restricted by outrageous prices set by a protected government monopoly. But there are signs that new media channels will grow in the New Year when new capacity is released. In the words of The Times tech columnist, Toby Shapshak:

• The big news in 2009 will be the mid-year launch of the second undersea cable, which will link southern and eastern Africa with India and Europe. Called Seacom, it's the first real competition to the existing Sat-3 cable that is part-owned and mostly controlled by Telkom.
  
• To remain competitive, Telkom will have to lower its wholesale prices significantly, and the cost of broadband should drop to the levels seen in developed countries, where always-on, superfast, unlimited broadband makes so many of the disruptive technologies and web-based services truly worthwhile.
  
• Telecoms companies tend to drop their prices just before competition arrives, in a bid to hold onto customers. From March 2009 I think we'll see a radical decrease in Telkom's prices, creating a ripple effect across the broadband industry.

So the Internet could see quite dramatic growth in 2009. The organisations that will be best positioned to take advantage of this are those that have integrated news, photographic and web operations. Even online, content is king and the content skills still reside with traditional print journalists.

They bring an incredible power, credibility and immediacy to the web that cannot be reproduced by shovelling wire copy into templates as some are doing.

I predict that many newspapers will follow the example set by The Times and try to re-engineer their operations to integrate the Internet with print for this very reason. What is a little alarming is the eagerness of some to retrench print skills in order to expand their online presence. They could be losing the very content skills that the web so desperately needs.

Our website has grown while others are suffering precisely because we offer the best content and we present it in video, audio, slideshows and, let's not forget, in properly edited words.

But even as newspaper companies play catch up and SA's bandwidth grows apace, something else dramatic will happen in 2009: The arrival of the cellphone as a proper carrier of news, sport and business.

The Times has already launched South Africa's most advanced mobile platform (http://m.thetimes.co.za) which streams pictures, podcasts and video to phones. Growth has been impressive, but it will really take off as cellphone browsing capacity improves with the rollout of new generation handsets that have larger screens and better downloading capacity.

South Africa's 2009 election is going to have a new media dimension that has never been seen in this country and the mobile phone, with its vast penetration of all income groups, will be the tool that parties use to raise funds, mobilise voters and arrange meetings.