Mobile West vs Mobile Rest

Mobile is the next big thing.
Have you heard that before? I have. In fact lately that is all I’ve heard from every direction and every guru or evangelist out there. And I use the words guru and evangelist very, very loosely.

Trying to figure out why everyone is saying that mobile is the next best thing.  Everyone is talking about mobile, but no one is being specific. All the big guns: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and many others have constantly been batting around mobile ideas, thoughts and concepts over the past 12 months, but none coherent, complete or steadfast. There is lots of talk, very little action, and even less knowledge floating around from the web-savvy smarts.

This is a new world. This is an emerging world and it is the emerging markets that are taking it on headfirst.[...]  Click on the headline link to read the full article on matthewbuckland.com

Finding a viable media business model in the digital age

By Monique Senekal, Managing Editor

Media enterprises operating in today’s Information Society, whether in developed or developing nations, are facing great uncertainties and challenges as to the specific approach they should be taking in responding to the global digital migration. Today consumers have greater choice and more control over the media they consume.

Just last week the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership at Rhodes University hosted 12 print media mid-level journalists and managers from across Africa in its first Essentials of Newspaper Management (EONM) short course for the year 2010. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to question the experienced group of print managers not only about their perceptions regarding the all-pervasive debate that the traditional media and, indeed, print media, are forced to develop a new business model to meet the needs of the digital age, the age of discontinuity, but also of the respective business strategies they are employing in responding to the global digital migration.

Quite surprisingly, most of the participants were steadfast in their belief that digital media is not really a threat to their businesses. Many explained that their management teams have had the foresight in using the internet as an extension of their product and/or service.

Shirley Govender, editor and managing director of the community newspaper and online publication Southern Globe, which services the greater Indian population in Lenasia, explains:

“As a monthly publication, we saw it as an imperative to go online because 80% of our audience work in Johannesburg, meaning that they need to commute at least two hours on a daily basis. Online we are able to update content regularly in a cost-effective manner. We therefore saw going online as an opportunity to better our service to our readers, allowing them to go online and catch up with their community news, whenever they have a few moments at work to do so.”

Govender further explains that going online has allowed them to expand their audience reach, now targeting the techno-savvy youth market. Strategically, their website caters not only for the need of the youth to network and interact, but also for the older readers’ need to gather information. Southern Globe’s online strategy also includes inviting readers to submit articles they think may be of interest to their target audience.

The EONM group of print managers are also recognising the value in real-time marketing. That is, they are using the interactive nature of the web for real-time, value-added customer relationship building. For example, Dirk Lotriet, deputy editor at Sondag, asserts that their online strategy for improving their service delivery is to offer the feedback loop, creating producer-consumer dialogue and relationship-building. Sondag has also introduced an interactive SMS section which invites readers to express their opinions and views about Sondag and the articles published in the newspaper. Furthermore, Lotriet adds that their value-added service is to offer picture archives and competitions online.

There is also the possibility for traditional print media to find new ways of generating revenue online. However, Adrian Henwood, co-owner of the Eastern Times community newspaper, Pretoria, is not convinced of the viability in investing in an online revenue generation strategy at the moment.

“There is no money going digital; our income is generated from selling ad space, not sales. Going digital is more about branding, getting our name out there,” he said.

Although Henwood is right in saying that online provides the opportunity for branding, there may be ways to generate extra revenue online for community print media. Perhaps they should think of strategies that offer their online users customised services that are uniquely differentiated from their competitors. The online product could, for example, allow consumers to obtain instant information on advertisers’ products or services to aid them in their crucial purchase decision process. The online site could also offer a ‘bid-or-buy’ section where the community could offer their unwanted goods for auction; they could also offer a point-of-transaction service to its reader and advertiser base which may increase their unique selling proposition to their existing and potential advertiser base.

Then there is the rapid expansion of mobile phones in Africa, which promises to close the digital divide between the haves and have-nots and the urban and rural populations and has made it easier for people to participate in social media networking.

With 28% of the African population having mobile access to date, the mobile phone has shown an exponential growth rate from only 2% in 2000, according to International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations. Compared to only 3% with access to the net, the mobile is, indeed, the future of web access in Africa. However, not many of the EONM participants spoke about using the mobile phone as an integral part of their strategic business strategies.

Betsie van der Merwe, co-owner and editor of the Eastern Times community newspaper, acknowledges print media’s need to take note of the opportunities offered by the mobile phone, adding:

“We must engage in mobile; it’s not a real threat to us right now but we must be aware of it."

Although many academics and journalistic critics muse that traditional journalism has fundamentally failed to serve the needs of the public – by being too elitist, selfish, product-orientated rather that consumer-driven – Lotriet counter-attacks and points out:

“Journalism might be failing the academics, but it is definitely not failing the public; our increasing readership proves that we are serving the needs of our target market.”

What emerges from this statement is the reality that the tabloidisation of today’s journalism is another thread coinciding with the digitisation of the media, whether the conservationists of traditional media like it or not. Lotriet asserts that “the success of tabloids, community newspapers and African language publications proves that they are giving people what they want”.

The fact that Sondag is structurally a tabloid newspaper may point to a parallel phenomenon occurring in the new media landscape: that the tabloidisation of the media on the one hand and an increase in user-generated content made possible by an increase in broadband on the other are two phenomena so similar in structure that they can almost be viewed as one and the same. Both assert the need for more grassroots journalism, journalism that is produced bottom-up, rather than top-down.

The question that remains is thus: how can tabloidisation and the increase in user-generated content in the digital age translate into effective and ethical management, the cornerstones of managing any successful business?

The title of this post marks the theme of this year’s African Media Leadership Conference, hosted annually by the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. The conference, taking place 26-29 September in Cairo, Egypt, will be a key learning and reflective platform where African media’s top dogs will discuss the structural and operational challenges, and the strategies they employ in an effort to remain credible, relevant and competitive in a fast-changing, digitised, market-driven media landscape.

Kenya races ahead of SA to provide varied media menu

By Francis Mdlongwa

A mobile phone company is hurriedly assembling editors and journalists to staff its digital media content distribution hub; a 24-hour television network has been launched both online and offline; and nearly half a dozen private television stations have sprung up.

Welcome to the ‘new’ Kenya. It’s good news for Kenyan audiences, though not necessarily for the incumbent traditional media houses.

The East African nation is quietly racing ahead of South Africa -- long regarded as Africa’s leader in economic, political, military and other fields -- in providing a rich and varied media menu to audiences.

Kenya’s largest mobile phone group, Safaricom, has started hiring editors to comb through local and foreign media to “localise and customise” news stories and information for its mobile subscribers, who, according to the firm’s half-year financials to September 2009, were 15 million in a country of 40 million people.

Could Safaricom be thinking of extending its news service to include deploying its own journalists to cover stories within Kenya and in neighbouring countries? Watch this space.

A new private television station, Kiss Television, which describes itself in Facebook as the “hypiest new TV station in Kenya”, went on air late last year to provide non-stop, 24-hour music for Kenya’s huge youthful audiences.

Operating both offline and online, Kiss serves up a diet of the latest hip hop sounds, rhythm and blues, soul and gospel music. Viewers and listeners phone in or SMS the station or go through the net to select a music video of their choice, which then automatically queues up to play, like the juke box of yesterday’s good, old world.

As well as relying on advertising, Kiss Television’s business model is based on sharing phone-in revenues with its telecoms partner.

Safaricom’s bold entry into journalism and of Kiss TV into the broadcast sector are but only the latest signs of a rapidly growing and dynamic media industry in Kenya since the 1990s liberalisation of the broadcasting and telecoms sectors there.

Safricom’s action in particular has many editors of Kenyan newspapers, radio and television stations worried because it potentially raises significantly competition for audiences among media firms in an already highly segmented and hyper-competitive market.

As David Maingi, head of corporate affairs at Nation Media Group (NMG), the largest media group in East and Central Africa as measured by market capitalisation and media presence in that region, told foreign journalists visiting Kenya recently:

“Kenyan editors are scrambling in all directions searching for answers as to what to do next, wondering about the impact on their media of Safaricom’s entry into the journalistic content market. No one can tell yet what it will be… but we have already been losing a sizeable slice of our market to the current heightened competition.”

As well as the state-run Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, which owns radio stations and a television service, Kenyans now wake up to watch around seven private television stations, most of which broadcast 24 hours across the nation, and to listen to several dozen radio stations, also run by private capital.

The competition for audiences is already stiff and it seems certain it will get tougher in the coming days, weeks and months.

The television stations range from K24, owned by Kenya’s emerging media tycoon and Nairobi University journalism graduate Rose Kimotho; to Nation Television (NTV) and Kenya Television Network (KTN).

NTV is owned by NMG, publishers of the once best-selling Daily Nation and several other newspapers, and KTN is owned by Kenya’s Standard Media Group, which also publishes several newspapers, including the daily Standard.

The news-driven television stations are modelled along the lines of the Atlanta-headquartered Cable News Network and the BBC World Television Service.

But I was most impressed by their fiercely-independent and balanced news, and their well-researched and packaged in-depth news analyses which would be the envy of many people “Down South” and elsewhere around the world. More so in today’s world which is largely dominated by “sound-byte” journalism that gives little meaning and context to the news!

One indicator of growing competition among media is the fact that the daily circulation of the Daily Nation is now around 100,000 versus 200,000 five years ago, Maingi said, noting the big negative impact of the internet and of several media companies that have sprung up in Kenya.

“Through research, we are constantly trying to understand why we are losing these readers,” he said.

“The internet has obviously had a huge impact because it offers free news, but we must re-position ourselves and constantly re-evaluate and renew ourselves if we are still to be the most desirable media leader in this region.”

While it is arguable whether a majority of “monied” Kenyans have access to the internet, it is clear that its advent, combined with new “sensationalist” newspapers which Kenyans brand the “gutter press”, plus new radio and television stations, has significantly raised competition among media for segmented news audiences.





One of the challenges for NMG – indeed for most media around the world– is for the group to work out whether it can make more money out of advertising by going totally online, as the Christian Science Monitor in the US has done, or continuing to serve its audiences with a fuller package offline.

Experience so far from the US shows that newspapers which have moved part of their content online are getting an average of only 12% of their advertising income from this platform – this is despite the fact that most American audiences are online (A year ago, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reported that its online edition was contributing around 15% of total income).

Of course, the situation in Africa is vastly different, with most audiences and advertisers still relying on the hard-copy editions of newspapers.

In the developed world, advertisers have not exactly followed content online, partly because the advertisers themselves can now go direct to customers using both online and mobile solutions.

One other key lesson for traditional media in the ‘age of discontinuity’, to quote C Christensen, is that they must not willy-nilly jump onto the bandwagon of the digital media platforms, throwing away all the good work which they would have done in the past to be successful.

Yes, they need to experiment and innovate with digital media and never be left behind, choosing what works for their media firms and market. But they need to do much more to perfect their core business (eg being a market leader in investigative journalism or in financial markets reportage) which would have fuelled their success.

Whatever platform media firms choose to use, audiences will still require content that is highly relevant to their needs and wants, is exclusive and helps to improve their lives and is presented accurately, truthfully and in a fair and balanced manner.

Yes, because of the migration of large segments of audiences to digital platforms, especially mobile, it is crucial for a media firm to be present there to experiment with how it can innovatively serve audiences while also making money.

South African media, especially print, should learn a lesson or two from their Kenyan counterparts. One of these is that South African newspapers should take bold steps to prevent a situation like that of the Daily Nation, whose circulation has halved in just a short five years.

There is also a lesson for South Africa from the mushrooming Kenyan media. South Africa needs to move faster in liberalising its broadcast sector so that more players can come in, not just to make the numbers but to add value and diversity in content in a rapidly fragmenting industry.

Sixteen years after South Africa’s freedom, the country south of the Limpopo still has just two main national broadcasters, a development which severely limits audiences’ choices.

Although pay-TV broadcasting licences have been granted to several companies, we are yet to see these come alive and offer a diverse range of content and programming which fosters healthy competition and hopefully gets the nation truly engaged in discourse about how it wants to live and to be governed.

Indeed one could argue that most South Africans can hardly afford to have access to pay television, so there is a need to open up the broadcasting sector to more free-to-air channels for the general public.