THE THICK END OF THE WEDGE
THIS column should be spent drooling over the majesty of JP Pietersen, the courage of Keegan Daniel, the destructive powers of Willem Alberts and wondering by just how much the Sharks might have beaten the Stormers on Saturday had they had been able to select their first team. Instead, I have miles to go and promises to keep. I said last week I’d talk about work.
Some time soon (a week or two, a day or two), a fundamental intrusion, an interference (picture needles poking at cells under microscopes) gets made deep down in the DNA of Business Day.
Outwardly, nothing will seem immediately different but what is essentially an experiment will change us forever and there isn’t any going back.
Prepare for something all you can, the timing is still everything. You, our treasured readers, will get very little notice of the change but when you do, it will be emphatic.
Business Day will, very soon now, become a “digital first” news brand. We will begin to publish what we know when we know it on our newly designed website first, and make the newspaper after that. Then, a few months after that we’ll wrap a mesh around the website and the applications (apps, they’re called) we have on iPhones and iPads and our stories — our product — will be for sale as BDlive.
I say “mesh” but this is, in fact, the “paywall” that many successful newspapers are building around their stories online. Some paywalls are watertight. BDlive is going to leak like crazy — there’ll be stories for free even before we ask you merely to register and more before we ask you to pay us anything.
Unless we do this SA can kiss goodbye to its own stand-alone daily business newspaper. There are fewer than 10 worldwide in English. Canada doesn’t have one.
No industry I know of has been hit on as many fronts as the newspaper industry in the past decade. The financial crisis has throttled advertising. The internet has changed the technology of news delivery beyond recognition.
So abundant has information become that much of the time readers think they already know everything. It’s like a mining company being told the price of its commodity has halved, from now on it must only be retrieved from under the ocean floor and no one wants it anyway. In SA, platinum miners simply shut up shop until the market returns. Newspapers can’t do that.
Yet for a long time we have indulged the insanity of producing a newspaper and trying to sell it at the same time as we place its entire content on the web and give it away for free. Many in my trade still think that makes sense in the long run. They’re brave with other people’s money.
After 38 years in the trade I still ache for the smell of newsprint in the morning and fully embracing digital is my way of saving Business Day as a newspaper in the long term. In print, we will change dramatically, but over time — after a day of reporting on the web there is no point repeating it all the next morning. So expect not only a different and exciting newspaper in our digital future, but a different kind of newspaper — reflective, forward-looking and planned.
I hope I can ask readers who are already registered on our websites and our apps to please (and I grovel as I ask), please bear with us. We will beg you to register again and (I hope) be able to help you when you are stuck as you move from our old site to BDlive, which is on a much newer “platform”.
Do I know what I am doing? No. But I have some wonderful colleagues who do. Steve Matthewson, our managing editor (news); Riaan Wolmarans, digital editor; Michael Biberauer, production editor extraordinaire ; Bronwen Auret, infinitely calm BDFM digital boss; Maphala Makgoba, who’ll hold your hand as you “migrate” in the next few days; Tshego Malinga, who’ll make sure the right people know the right things at the right time, and Miles BrittonMasekela, who has to dream up ways of making a buck out of the whole thing.
It is all, basically, impossible. Pearl Sebolao, Business Day’s deputy editor, and I sometimes cower fearfully in my office as the whizz kids speed about us. We comfort ourselves by hiring great journalists. Nick Kotch, the world’s most experienced Africa correspondent still working, joins this week as Business Day’s first Africa editor. Alexander Parker comes back to cover the auto industry. Manoah Esipisu, another serious Africa hand, joins as special reports editor. Yay! I am a lucky man and we will be fine. Pass the scotch. Sharks Forever!