Some Background

Matthew Buckland is the publisher of Mail & Guardian (M&G) Online. He is responsible for the digital strategy of M&G Online, sales and editorial strategies.

The paper’s focus is on commentary and analysis, investigative articles and human rights issues, and it targets the South African upper income classes and intelligentsia. The weekly print Mail & Guardian’s circulation rose to just below 50,000 copies in 2006.  It is “still a small newspaper and media company, but it’s showing good growth,” says Buckland. The online edition is a breaking news website, which publishes from 60 to 70 stories per day. It has 550,000 unique visitors per month and 3.8 million page impressions. The Mail & Guardian Online has 12 people on its staff. Both the print and online editions are profitable.

M&G used to be “all about the newspaper,” before web surpassed print. Now, further down the road, the M&G is more interested in becoming “a company producing content, getting content on as many media and platforms as possible,” says Buckland.

Multimedia Content

As M&G Online took on importance, it established an array of multimedia and edgy features:

_The weekly podcast was launched last November. Buckland hired a “very well known radio personality,” Tony Lankester, which makes for a quite unique – because highly professional – podcast. This also attracted advertisers and Lankester’s radio network of listerners.

_M&G online also experimented with a “free for all” blog area, launched two years ago, where anybody could post about anything. “Frankly, we’re not very happy with it,” admits Buckland. “The platform was too basic,” he says, and he plans on a complete overhaul with more functionality. His idea is to create a “MySpace blogger hybrid.” It’s vague, but it should be interesting to see the results.
More important to him, Buckland is now working on a more conventional blog area, which would be invite-only, cover just about “everything,” and group the opinions from selected local and international leaders in their field, whether it’s about politics, new media or sports.

_M&G launched a mobile website just three weeks ago, which sends a basic reproduction of the print and online M&G to cell phones. Better yet, the service is pretty much free (it costs 1 rand, $0.15, for the initial SMS only).

_Finally, perhaps one of the more innovative – and entertaining – M&G Online features, is its three-week-old ‘News in Photos’ website. “It incorporates reader opinions, reader submissions and Web 2.0,” in an effort to be more interactive. The website also serves as a valuable resource and archive for M&G photographers, who can now store their extra pictures.
The website has already posted about 60 user pictures in the first two weeks, which are picked by the news and photo editors for their news relevance and graphic quality. “It surpassed our expectations,” says Buckland (Poynter Institute article).

While M&G Online carries multiple multimedia features, it lacks video. Why, you may ask? This leads us to consider the challenges of the South African market.

The South African Market

South Africa is the most web-wired African country, by far. Yet it lags behind some of its US or European cousins, with an Internet penetration rate of about 10% - that’s nonetheless 2.6 million users per month on average who visited an Online Publishers Association (OPA) member website.

“At one stage South Africa was ranked 11th in the world, but we lost ground as a result of the cost of internet here which ranks among the highest in the world — it’s a wonder that South Africa, despite this, is still by far the top internet country in Africa,” wrote Buckland on his personal blog (South Africa is now 36th, CIA’s factbook).

So why, or how, does the M&G manage to be so tech-savvy and online-oriented within a relatively unwired context?

Well, “in the last two years things have started to improve,” says Buckland. For four reasons (which also happened to be the main barriers to online expansion and access):
_The exorbitant price (world’s highest) of telecommunications – previously a monopoly owned by Telkom, the South African just licensed a competitor, Neotel – has started to decrease.
_Broadband access is starting to become more widespread.
_The South African economy in general is booming.
_And perhaps most importantly, “the Internet appeals to the middle class and wealthy.”
(There is hardly any middle class, as social classes in South Africa are still polarized, and the middle class is itself considered wealthy.)

Thus how can a niche, multimedia-focused publication, succeed in South Africa, a market in which most people have low income and relatively few people have Internet access?

A study by the OPA revealed that 62% of online visitors log in from their workplace and 27% from home – 41% of total respondents didn’t even have Internet access at home. The report also showed that the vast majority of online users came from urban areas, and that most users are young (59% below 35), well-educated (79% have further education), and have high income.

Therefore, although online penetration may only be about 10% in South Africa, Buckland safely guesstimates that M&G Online’s penetration reaches the vast majority of its target market (the well-educated and wealthy intelligentsia).

This is the key answer to M&G’s success – and its seemingly paradoxical emphasis on online and multimedia tools. To an extent, it is because broadband and online technologies aren’t widespread yet that the Mail & Guardian Online is profitable.  
Because most South Africans do not have regular access to the Internet, the M&G knows the wealth bracket of its readers and their social persona, and can therefore appeal to advertisers.

To an extent, the ‘South African paradox’ justifies M&G’s implementation of a mobile website, its emphasis on a podcast service, and its lack of a video feature.
National cell phone penetration is higher than that of fixed phone lines (due in part to the high cost of fixed lines). Thus, in South Africa, implementing a mobile news service almost sounds like common sense, whereas an online edition is ‘elitist’!
Likewise, because broadband access is still limited and costly, few users could comfortably view online videos (as opposed to podcasts, which require limited bandwidth). As broadband access spreads, Buckland hopes to set up a video feature soon, as Mail & Guardian’s competitors recently have.

Interestingly then, the democratization of the Internet could, instead of reinforcing M&G Online’s solid position, hinder profitability, as new readers might not be as interested in quality content and analytical stories.

South Africa: For Other Newspapers

Other newspapers, whether print or online, have to put up with similar barriers linked to high telecommunications’ costs. Another “big negative,” concedes Buckland, “is our heavy dependence on wire copy.” This of course, is not a problem specific to South Africa or the M&G. “It’s simply a question of resources,” says Buckland, because as readership and online ad revenue grow the paper will be able to do more first-hand reporting.

On the other hand, as mentioned above, the current barriers to online media and high costs of telecommunications are being cut down: in fact, South Africa could be one of Africa’s most dynamic areas for the media in the years to come.  

“Since the advent of democracy South African media have found their voice again,” says Buckland.

Unlike the US market, news websites are among the most visited in South Africa (again because web access is usually reserved to a news-craving elite). Thus, despite a small staff, M&G Online is South Africa’s 4th biggest website in terms of total traffic, and 3rd among news websites after Media24 and Independent Online (OPA report).

There exists a growing market for general news publications and niche publications, which will certainly continue to expand as demand increases. Of course the demand might not be geared towards quality content: The Daily Sun tabloid has become the country’s best-selling daily in the few years since its launch.

Publishers and editors will have a chance to prospect the South African market during the 14th World Editors Forum to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, from June 3 through 6.

“It is important to understand the country in terms of its history, demographics and power struggle. South Africa is a country full of promise for newspapers,” says Buckland.

Source: Matthew Buckland, publisher of Mail & Guardian Online – Editors Weblog – Biz-community.com – Poynter.org – CIA factbook – OPA.org


More Background

The Mail & Guardian, originally Daily Mail, was founded in 1985 by independent anti-Apartheid South African journalists. In 1995, the UK-based The Guardian became a majority shareholder in the paper and it was renamed to Mail & Guardian. Launched in 1994, the Mail & Guardian Online was the first internet-based news publication in Africa. Since then, The Guardian reduced its stake to 10% of the paper, which is now owned in majority by Newtrust Company Botswana Limited (owned by M&G CEO Trevor Ncube).