Renee Moodie, interactive head at IOL, revealed a remarkable fact at this afternoon’s Challenges of Content: A South Africa Perspective session. Their most popular story over the last seven years - more than 9/11, more than Najwa, more than Dina Rodrigues or other world-changing affairs, has been an article entitled: Woman ‘miraculously’ grows a penis.
To give you some idea of how staggeringly popular this is, their second-most popular article has had just over 600,000 views. The ‘miracle’ article is currently sitting on 937,766 views.
The question on Renee’s mind is: where’s the dividing line between news and entertainment? How has it shifted over the last few years? How does online news popularity differ to offline. And is there a line between the two? And does there need to be?
I have no doubt that article in question will have garnered another couple of thousand reads by this evening, so to save you the trouble of searching for it, here’s the link:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=vn20050714080208315C857453
Weeeiirrrd.
On a serious note, this is a thought-provoking topic.
Riaan Wolmarans from Mail and Guardian Online introduced their live projects and explained some of their internet-specific editorial limitations when compared to larger newsrooms with dedicated techno-ready journalists.
DeWaal Steyn from Die Burger Online tackled some key technical and operational issues behind what it really takes to power an online editorial team, including equipment and training hurdles that have to be looked at carefully.
Carly Ritz, multimedia ed at The Times, took us through their growth phase, ultimately resulting in a pod system in their newsroom. A news reporter, sits with a news photographer who sits with a multimedia producer. As news happens, it gets written for the paper and produced for online use at the same time. But though they’ve grown quickly, Carly realises the pros and cons of a young team, including limited journalistic and technical expertise. Equipment, software and production problems (noisy background sound and weather can affect a story) are also there but being tackled day to day. Most importantly, The Times focuses on ensuring that the multimedia material offers an additional experience to the copy in the article.
Overall, an encouraging encounter in the life of online multimedia in South Africa and Africa. Nice guys.
