thenewnewmedia.com

Meet Sambit Bal. He’s the editor of cricinfo.com, the best cricket website in the world. A website so good, you want there to be one for rugby and for soccer. The writing is brilliant and Bal’s is the best of the lot.

I’ve rated him as the best in the business for some time, but this was the story that convinced me of the fact: It’s only a game: Woolmer’s death, whatever the cause, tells us that cricket needs a reality check.

Read that without getting a lump in your throat.

Everytime I read Bal’s writing, he manages to put into words the sheer passion I can see, hear and read when a good friend of mine talks about cricket (even if its on instant messenger).

This morning, Bal wrote about powerhouses flexing their muscles in power cricket. The mind-numbingly boring previews of cricket contests we’re subjected to in the dailies here in Joburg can’t even begin to compare.

About Sambit Bal
Now read his columns

So Ananzi, in all their wisdom, have decided to launch what they call a wiki. They have used their startpage site to release this product … but is it a wiki?
Wasn’t this supposed to be something like Microsoft’s start.com (or live.com) or Google’s personalised home page? I know that technically this could be a wiki-type thing, but isn’t it just a user-generated directory? (more…)

This is what the New York Times home page looked like yesterday morning (SA time).

• Two interactive flash graphics
• A gallery
• Three videos
• Audio (built-in player)
• Nearly a dozen articles (including backgrounders)

(more…)

Wits Journ Professor Anton Harber has more details (and dummy pages) from soon-to-be-launched newspaper, The Times.

I agree with his point about the Berlin-type format:

Pity they have not been able to go for the new compact size (somewhere between tabloid and broadsheet, like The Weekender).

Their choice of the two columnists who appear in the dummy (Justice Malala and David Shapiro), is impressive. Ray Hartley (el editoristo) has confirmed they are part of the line-up. I know David, and it’ll be interesting to read what he writes about.

There’s some comment around advertising, the business model behind the new paper, as well as more thoughts around the production process:

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Ok. You’re a biggish news-type site in a developing country like South Africa. Video is everywhere on US news sites, and the future does seem to be headed that way. You need video. Don’t you?

The problem with video and multimedia, especially in this country, is its cost. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around this lately, and the main questions I can’t answer are:
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Marketing expert Chris Moerdyk has written about The Times on bizcommunity.com saying that the hundred-year-old Sunday Times has finally leveraged its most valuable asset. There’s not much we don’t already know. Some interesting opinions and thoughts, which Moerdyk summed up at the end:

But, while everything looks rosy for this venture, everything will depend entirely on whether those 127 000 subscribers are receptive to a daily newspaper. On whether they are people who are currently buying, subscribing to or occasionally reading existing dailies.

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YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: Local sports website SuperSport has gotten rid of the awful “SignMeIn” log-in system which (previously) restricted access to MWEB and DStv subscribers. Hardly bulk traffic. And with a walled-content strategy, they were always going to lose out on search engine traffic.

SuperSport.co.za has about 150 000 unique browsers with just over 1m impressions a month, but these figures don’t account for all the traffic the site gets. (more…)

Something I’ve been wanting to write for about six months: this week’s column. I’m willing to bet that Telkom will look something like this in about three years’ time…

Note to self: don’t rush to post something here in the two minutes you have free before lunch.

Ray Hartley (The Times Editoristo) wrote this morning about the response he and the team have got from local bloggers. And he mentioned the “pasting” he got from the previous post here… which, admittedly I could have taken more time to write.

The post wasn’t meant to attack the product or the innovation behind it, rather the cliched reporting which surrounded the announcement.

I know whatever it is The Times team develop will be near ground-breaking in this market. Most newsrooms in this country consider the web to be secondary. Tertiary, in fact. 

I know that The Times will be succesful and I know that I will probably end up subscribing to its big brother, simply to be able to enjoy my copy with coffee in the mornings…

I hate The Star and can’t bring myself to read it. Aside from the boredom which is The Star, I enjoy The Citizen*…

Onward to June!

*Disclosure: Moneyweb runs a joint venture with The Citizen to produce business content for the paper, draw your own conclusions…

Matthew tipped me off about this: there’s a carefully cropped image of the new Sunday Times baby (The Times) on a blog written by the (soon-to-be) paper’s editor Ray Hartley. Matt’s blogged about it…

In announcing the paper this weekend, phrases like “totally integrated paper” and “24 hour news experience online and in print” were used. Isn’t this the norm?

In the piece in the Business Times, readers were also treated to this delightful description: “In a significant break with traditional newspapers, The Times will use a range of digital products — like a website, pod casts (sic!), cellphones and e-mail — to constantly interact with its readers.” Give me a break. Since when is this “significant”?

That said, I am very certain that Ray Hartley (who I still haven’t met) will make this work, “ground-breaking” and “totally integrated” cliches notwithstanding.

My bet: expect something very very similar to how the Sunday Times looks and reads over Christmas when it “downsizes” to tabloid.