WHERE am I? I won’t play up the Old Media Guy too much but it is strange to be printing something I know, for sure, will never appear on newsprint. This is my first blog. Welcome.

I recently criticised a senior banker for suggesting his staff drop their newspaper subscriptions because everything in them is free on the internet. I mildly suggested that it was still mainly newspapers who were paying for journalism to occur and asked that, please, let’s not destroy that until websites are able to pay for their own journalism.

You’d have thought I’d suggested dropping the legal smoking age to five. One perfectly respectable media type called me an ostrich, or a word to that effect. Another was shocked at how “bleak” I was.  Another called me sentimental and when I posted an explanation on his blog he ignored it totally, stuck to his previous opinion, and thanked me for the “debate”.

If that was debate the internet has a lot of growing up to do, but it is a pleasure to be here nevertheless. Perhaps I and my Business Day colleagues who will shortly join me with their own blogs will raise the tone of things in South Africa. We have only in the past few months been able at BDFM, our publishers, to create a stand-alone online department, whose head reports to the company MD. That’s the right way to go.

The online-print debate has a long way to go. Here especially, perhaps, because of our dreadful bandwidth problems. It isn’t about whether newspapers as we know them will survive forever. They won’t. It is about journalism of a reasonable quality surviving. It must.

You should try to look at three really good articles I have read on the subject recently. One was a debate in Prospect, a British intellectual monthly http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/05/areweontrackforagoldenageofseriousjournalism/. Another was in the New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23050 and the last was a piece by Jason Pontin, who publishes the MIT Technology Review at http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/pontin/23489/ . I hope they help take the bluster out of the debate going on in our country on the issue. We wouldn’t want to confuse advertisers now would we?

The economic recession is having a much bigger effect on newspaper revenues than is the internet and the geeks who lie dreaming about the end of print are in for a long wait.

In the meantime, there are more important things for The Thick End of the Wedge to be getting on with. Readers will, ultimately, choose how they want to receive their content and intelligent publishers (if that’s not an oxymoron) will give it to them.

I was interested to see my friend Branko Brkic relaunching his unsuccessful print venture Maverick Magazine, online yesterday and I wish him well. I also marvel at the almost Baroque complexity of a local news aggregator and website called The Richmark Sentinel. But by far my favourite site away from Business Day’s is my former colleague Gill Moodie’s Grubstreet.  You should have a look at it. She’s got a great news sense and is extremely, um, independent

It was Grubstreet which, by making a simple telephone call, showed up acting National Prosecuting Authority head Mokotedi Mpshe as a patsy when Gill called the Hong Kong  judge whose work Mpshe had quoted to justify his cowardly decision not to prosecute Jacob Zuma earlier this year. The guy in Hong Kong told her Mpshe had misused his judgement.

That was only the second time I can remember a South African internet news site getting a scoop I was envious of as a print editor. The first was Alec Hogg’s Moneyweb scooping the early draft of mining legislation that wiped billions off the JSE all those years ago.

Hopefully this blog marks the start of another jump by Business Day into the New Age. When we get it right (and we will) we will be unbeatable.

Cheers

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