POINT OF ORDER
IUSUALLY use this column to talk about current events, but allow me this time to use this space for a small but significant commercial break. Business Day, with some of the other newspapers in the Times Media Group, is going to be rather fundamentally revamped, and I would like to take a moment to reflect on this publication and newspapers in general.
We, with a consultancy, The Innovation Media Group, have been working on a new design for Business Day, which has looked the same for more than a decade.
In addition, we have changed the newsroom design, changed the copy flow process, and we will present, within a few weeks, the new look. To top it all, we are preparing not one but two new websites.
I’m pretty sure readers will be totally blown away by the changes but I’m just a touch concerned they will be blown away completely!
Business Day, and its “look and feel” as it is described by people I don’t really understand, is part of the furniture in SA. It’s something of an article of faith, or at least that is what I wish to believe. One messes with this impression at one’s peril.
Yet, the more I look at the new website, the more the old one seems hopelessly old-fashioned.
The new website has a “hamburger bar”, a term that was totally new to me until the designers mentioned it in passing. All good websites have a hamburger bar, apparently.
It is the icon with the three horizontal bars that websites use now as an abbreviation for “show me all the other stuff that used to be there but I can’t see anymore”.
Technology has a terrible way of making you feel old, a quality the technologically savvy use to their own advantage with horrible efficacy.
The same applies to the newspaper. The more I look at the new designs of the newspaper, the more I wonder why on earth there is a map of SA on the masthead of the old one. Who put it there? What is it for? Do readers really need to be reminded every day in the prime space that this is a South African newspaper?
Working on this process in the background over the past few months has been exhilarating and exhausting. Our aim is really to take the new information order and shake it about with zest until we can find a place in it that really works for us, our readers, our reporters and our owners.
And really I cannot tell you how hard it has been.
I attended the last annual Christmas get-together between Anglo American and the press, and there was only one topic of conversation: which industry was declining faster, mining or newspapers? Most people at the function were convinced that mining was declining faster, but was more likely to rebound. And besides, Anglo owns a wine farm, and could always change track into consumer beverages if push really came to shove.
When I joined Business Day way back in the 1990s, it had an editorial staff of about 50. By its heyday in the late 2000s, the staff was about 120. We are now more or less back to where we were when I started.
Circulation has followed the same sort of trend.
It has been the same sort of trend around the world, which is partly why organisations such as Innovation Media have sprung up.
We in the newspaper industry often write positively about “disruption”, while ironically we are one of the most disrupted industries out there. The dynamics of the problem are identical everywhere: people use the internet more and more for information and newspapers less and less.
But looks are deceiving. While Business Day’s circulation has more or less halved over the past decade, the BDLive website has been a stunning success. Its circulation, most often calculated as UBs, or unique browsers, doubled the year before last, then doubled again last year, and is 50% up this year. Taken together, the newspaper and the website are attracting perhaps double the number of eyeballs the duo attracted even at their height. The problem is that for some reason newspaper people cannot understand, advertisers are not prepared to pay the same amount for the same number of eyeballs online and in print.
Yet, this is changing and changing fast. Internet revenue constituted perhaps 5% of total revenue 10 years ago internationally; it now constitutes around 13% globally, and a little less for Business Day.
I was also very heartened to see recently that the readership of the New York Times and the Washington Post, both paid-for sites, now outnumber the duo of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, two free-to-air icons of the new age.
It turns out that, ultimately, people get sick of cat pictures and meaningless garble.
Anyway, please do bear with us in these days of change; I think the improvements are tremendous and I’m sure you will enjoy them.