LITMIR.BIZ

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new ownership – and what would turn out to be a brilliant partnership with then chief operating officer Hoosain Karjieker – kept me at the company. When few believed that the online site could make money and be profitable, it was Hoosain that backed me and gave me what I needed to prove everyone wrong.

      M&G Online limped on, technically in a rickety state stuck together with sticky tape. In the midst of these difficult times, good news arrived. My negotiations to end the blanket paywall that had been such a source of acrimony were showing signs of success. Before long the fraught decision to charge users money to access the newspaper’s online content would be reversed. M&G Online would soon be free again.

      Despite the site’s weak technical state, a new era of online commercial and editorial success began. I pushed through a new online sales strategy when it became clear that it was not possible for the successful print sales team to sell the online site.

      I proposed a title change for myself and moved from working as an editor to serving as the division’s publisher, later becoming its general manager. To spearhead the new online sales strategy, I recruited a focused and single-minded sales executive, Bryan Mlungisi Khumalo. He had been hidden away, like a complex maths algorithm hidden in the blockchain, at the successful technology news site ITWeb.

      With Khumalo on board, sales underwent a complete turnaround. Within six months the site was smashing revenue records, often showing profitability, which was unusual for a website in those days. We expanded the sales team and put more people under Khumalo, who became the sales manager. I myself jumped into the sales effort, setting myself some aggressive targets. Reporting the revenue figures in those days was a pleasure. The graph always pointed upwards. Happy days indeed.

      Riaan Wolmarans, a respected and indefatigable subeditor, defected from the print operation to become the online subeditor, and later the online editor. Precise to a fault, he became known as ‘the doctor’. A new era of editorial rigour began. Traffic and revenues blossomed. We found ourselves punching above our weight.

      It was an era in which both print and online readerships were growing in tandem, unheard of in a period in which newspapers were haemorrhaging readers to the internet. For the first time ever, the website was contributing significantly to the company’s revenues.

      I was given the freedom at the Mail & Guardian to build my own business within the company. I was left to my own devices to create product and processes, to build my own revenues and then expand the division based on the money we made … just like an entrepreneur. In fact, I was an ‘intrapreneur’, an entrepreneur with the comforts of corporate support. These experiences laid the foundation for my later entrepreneurial ambitions, and it was at the M&G that I built up the necessary confidence and understanding to build and scale a business.

      Things were going well. I was in control of my own revenues and my own technology – and I was free to innovate and build what I wanted. It was around this time that we built what was probably the first blogging platform in the country. A rather subversive and anarchic MWEB web developer by the name of Pete Hart-Davis demonstrated a new platform called Drupal. I didn’t get it at first, because I couldn’t see the difference between a blog and a forum. When I did get it, I wanted it on the site yesterday.

      In those days, forums ruled the internet. Forums were for discussions and comments, the equivalent of small talk and frivolous words at a party where everyone is able to join in and have their say. Blogs, on the other hand, were more conducive to long-form content or journalism, and only certified or invited authors could write them – not everyone and anyone at the party. It suddenly made content publishing and journalism accessible, but in a format that encouraged quality and some exclusivity.

      At first we called out platform Blogspot, which was idiotic because that was also the name of Google’s blog platform, but later we called it blogmark.co.za.

      A small but thriving blogging community grew overnight. We signed up hundreds of authors in a short amount of time, all of whom enthusiastically embraced the new blog format and the ability to write freely beneath the M&G brand. Our blog instantly broke the traditional media model. Here we were attracting good content from hundreds of columnists, many of whom were not professional journalists, writing freely and for free on a platform we had created.

      But the utopia did not last, and Blogmark soon became a real test of our editorial policy – and our patience.

      Ian Fraser, a local comedian and writer, was one of the more popular bloggers on the site. He began to test the increasingly blurry boundaries that existed between the M&G website’s professionally created content and the user-generated content of Blogmark by supplying some hard-core sexual writing. In fact, his writing became more hard-core with every blog he produced.

      Then Ian published a piece in which he threatened to kill then president Thabo Mbeki. It was a piece of satire – poor satire in my opinion. But that particular blog attracted the attention of the national police commissioner. I got a call from senior investigators wanting me to hand over all our bloggers’ details. We refused, and instead tried to mediate a meeting between Ian and the police to sort things out. The Freedom of Expression Institute intervened on Ian’s behalf. Ian ended up emigrating overseas.

      There were three print editors during this period: Makhanya succeeded Howard Barrell, and when Makhanya left for the Sunday Times, the post was taken up by the sharp-minded and genial Ferial Haffajee. At this point a critically important thing happened at the M&G: the company’s reporting structures changed.

      The M&G Online manager no longer reported to the print editor but directly to the CEO. Trevor invited representation from the online division to the highest management structure: the exco, where key decisions were made and strategy was formed. It was a visionary move and it differed from the tactics of many other media companies that still viewed their online effort as an adjunct, a box to tick, with the online manager usually remaining in junior or middle management. This new reporting structure would prove to be a key turning point for the M&G’s online division.

      Despite these successes, the site design, structure and technical condition remained weak. Legal threats and acrimonious emails marked the relationship with our MWEB shareholders, who were unable to provide the focus the site needed to save it from the technical issues that plagued it. We would wait weeks for basic links to change on the home page and endure embarrassing errors on the site. The site’s search facility was a disaster, and users routinely complained about it.

      In 2003, there was a second attempt by MWEB to block content on the site – this time with something billed as an ‘intelligent paywall’. The block would require payment only when users accessed certain articles. Naturally we were suspicious. In those days people would happily spend eight rand on a beer, but would not spend the equivalent of a beer per month for all the quality content on the M&G. People were simply accustomed to a free internet. In their view, the internet started out free and should always be free, regardless of stone-cold economic realities.

      During negotiations, I had endured senior MWEB manager Russel Yeo bellowing ‘Fuck you!’ down the phone to me when I refused to accede to a demand to block off a large portion of the site for paying readers only.

      I recall a conversation with another exec who phoned me in the midst of tense negotiations and said, ‘You … you … you Mail & Guardian people. You are all the same – you always do this.’ I never knew quite what he meant, but I took it as an unintended compliment.

      In principle, I was not opposed to a paywalled site as I knew that revenue was important to us, and more revenue simply meant a better-quality product and better journalism.

      What I was objecting to was the rushed, disorganised way it was foisted upon us. We were informed of the paywall deadline just a few days before the change was to take place. There was no business plan, no agreement or research about what we would need to charge, and no time to communicate the changes to users. It was a disaster. At this point, we decided it was time to take back technical control and rebuild the site ourselves.

      Revenues were strong enough to support this new strategy. We brought on board a talented Rhodes University new-media lecturer by the

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