Monitor’s Internet Geek

Ali Balunywa in Kampala, Uganda 

Grace Natabaalo is the Monitor’s Internet/Online subeditor. The Monitor is Uganda’s other second English daily newspaper. (www.monitor.co.ug) It is an independent daily founded by a group of journalists. Currently, it is owned by East Africa’s biggest media house, The Nation Group of Companies that publishes the biggest circulating newspaper in East Africa. It also owns radios and televisions in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. 

Grace is a graduate of Mass Communications. She joined the Monitor in 2006. Her work involves moderating comments from online readers and mobile phone text messages.

First thing in the morning she checks out the radio websites for stories not run in the paper, which she uploads, to the online edition. She then gathers incoming news from reporters and updates the website. She continues doing that during the course of the day. Grace uploads the website manually story-by-story. 

Grace subscribes to the Monitor Mobile alerts. A subscriber receives an SMS text with breaking news or headlines for the next day’s paper.

Grace is an ardent blogger and her blog name is: www.nattygrace.wordpress.com. She also uses Social Networking Sites like Twitter, Face book and Skype. She subscribes to the CNN news alerts for international news. She also belongs to Digbsy, which combines all chat clients like Yahoo messenger, MSN and Gmail.

In future, she said the team of Internet reporters will give readers a different content from the print version. Today the whole print version on the Internet is found at; www.epaper.monitor.co.ug 

With the coming of fibre optics cable and accompanying bandwidth expansion, the Monitor’s website will be put to maximum use. All editor’s and writers will be expected to have personal blogs. The website will also incorporate  audio and video components to make it fully interactive.

 

 

 

New Vision Automated Pre Press

Reuben Zaramba is the New Vision Pre press manager. He is a holder of a BA degree in industrial and commercial design. He joined the New Vision group in 2004. His job requires him to prepare all work for printing.

Reuben told me that New Vision had acquired modern equipment in the pre press department. The old technology involved making films in a dark room. Today the process is automated direct from computer to plate to press. The artwork of the newspaper is received from the subeditor through the intranet in PDF form in soft copy.

Pre press staff makes an imposition – dummy book like layout on a plate using imposition software. The proofs are presentations of what will appear at the end of the process. It is compared with what is on computer and if okay impressions are made ready to copy to plate.  Plates have a coating, which is photo sensitive on one side where the laser beam burns the image.

All these processes use new media for example mobile telephony; “We can receive mobile alerts from the machines should something go wrong during processing. The mobile telephone is also used to contact the subeditor in case there is a problem with the PDF”.

The Internet is also used frequently. The mobile alerts from the machine are also sent to our emails. Additionally New Vision upcountry bureaus use email to send their PDF of the regional newspapers for printing. Before automation, a car used to be provided to drive hundreds of kilometers to collect the dummies.

 

 

 

Chitchat with Vision’s Website Editor

Ali Balunywa in Kampala, Uganda

Davis Weddi joined the New Vision in 1996 as a freelance journalist. His first story was placed on the front page of The New Vision on 1st April 1996. It was a fool’s day story of vampires attacking travellers in a bus! He was confirmed as a full time staff in 2004. He has studied in Sweden, German and South Africa photojournalism courses, features writing and news websites.

Interview

Ali: Where did you study website building and maintenance?

Davis: I did a course in Global Electronic Journalism for 6 months from Stockholm University in Sweden. The course involved research news websites, uploading audio, visual and video online. We used tools like PHP, Java, CSS mobile XML, XTML and promoting new languages. There after, I worked for a company that took SMS orders for MacDonald’s in Stockholm.

Where did you start from when you joined the New Vision?

In 2003, I found a static website portal; www.enteruganda.com, and I started uploading it casually. In 2004 I was made the website editor at the New Vision. The division was employing 7 staff, but making a paltry $ 200.00 a month! The division needed dynamism to make money. This called for adequate content and a better content uploading team. 

We gave ourselves a target of earning $ 25,000 per month within 4 years. Today we are earning much more than that with a staff of 8 well-paid people. We have also opened up new websites; each product now has its own website. We also established a jobs website; www.jobs.co.ug. Our clients, the advertisers from the print media add an extra 5% of the cost for the same advert to be run online. The income from the online advertisements is much more than what some newspapers in this country earn.

The websites are now integrated with the newsroom via the Integrated Enterprise Content Management System (IECMS), which will facilitate erasing paper use from the newsroom. The workflow system follows what a journalist does – distributes stories to the editors, sub editors, pre press and finally to the printer and finally uploaded online automatically.

Hasn’t this automation reduced the readership of the hard copy?

The statistics available don’t show that sales are suffering; our biggest online readers are abroad.

How does your website fare compared to other websites in Uganda?

Out team looks at self-generated and Google analytics. It is the most visited website in Uganda so far. Our website is dynamic and we have the capacity of uploading content anytime. For example, we can upload content for the Uganda market the next day and for the Diaspora the evening before. We now sell our Internet stories internationally to organizations like AllAfrica.com

Where are you heading to with the website?

We hope to redesign the website to meet modern times. We are now testing mobile SMS. There is also a need to unify radio, newspaper and television. Mobile alerts are also in the pipeline.  We have already collected 2 million mobile telephone numbers and we hope to work with the mobile telephony operators to establish whether a number is switched on. The New Vision is to sign up with all telephone mobile operators to allow all users to access the service.  We are also confident that applications like E-government, E-Health, and E-Business can be sold to government. In this case government can use or telephone number database for communicating development, health or political messages.

Journalists will also be enabled to send breaking news through the same system. The system will allow readers and listeners to the New Vision’s products interactivity with each other and with the newsroom.

What ICT challenges has New Vision met? 

New Vision is prepared to meet all challenges head on. It has heavily invested in its staff through in-house training and IT schooling. So far a few journalists maintain blogs, but soon it will be a requirement for every journalist to keep a blog, where he/she can interact with readers.

How is Internet use nationally?

Uganda’s Internet usage is on the increase. Every day newspapers sign up new online readers especially the youth. Statistics from the ICT ministry show increased Internet usage. Currently there are over 22,000 local websites and nearly 300,000 email addresses. The New Vision has positioned well itself to meet this increasing demand. Soon local language websites will be developed.