February is known as the month of love and for the South Africa Media Innovation Program (SAMIP) we got to express our love for the local media industry and for our participants. The short month may only have twenty-eight days but we packed in more than two months worth of work in it: We went on speed-dates, hung out in a cool workspace learning about native advertising and prepared to expand our cohort of grantees.

Speed dating among journalists

Our highlight event for the month was a speed dating and networking event that SAMIP held with members of the South Africa National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) and business and technology developers in Cape Town. The event took place on the evening of February 8 at Workshop17’s Waterfront venue.  

The event kicked off with an address by newly appointed SANEF chairperson Mahlatse Mahlase on the state of news media in South Africa. 

.@SAEditorsForum chairperson Mahlatse Mahlase kicks things off at @SAMIP_MDIF’s networking event in Cape Town #QuitYourJob pic.twitter.com/ywRHGH1xGQ

— Siyabonga Africa (@siyafrica) February 8, 2019

SAMIP program officer Siyabonga Africa then introduced the program to the attendees and teased out our “Quit Your Job” challenge – which you will hear more about in time.

Our program manager, Bilal Randeree coordinated the speed-dating rounds and towards the end of the programme SAMIP called up interested parties to pitch their ideas to the audience at large. Some great media ideas were heard and the event will hopefully be repeated in Johannesburg in the future.

Going native

The following week we hosted our grantees at Workshop17 for a workshop on native advertising. Forbes estimates that the ever-evolving field of native campaigns will account for 74% of advertising revenue by 2021.

Our participants (which included Daily Maverick, The Daily Vox, Digest, Hashtag our Stories, Igunundu Press, The New Era, Soul City, Volume and invited guests from the Mail & Guardian and ViewFinder) were taken through the history of native advertising and why it’s an important revenue stream by Media Development Investment Fund entrepreneur-in-residence Matthew Buckland. 

The attendees also heard from native advertising experts in the fields of publishing an advertising, who gave their take on native campaigns and the learnings they made in them.

Matthew impressed on the attendees that if they tried “dressing up advertising as editorial” they were sure to lose the game. Kathryn and Bernard Kotze from Daily Maverick’s in-house brand studio, Beatnik, also emphasised the ethics of aligning native campaigns with editorial policies. Moneyweb national sales manager Tracy Parsons advised that publishers should stand their ground in negotiations with media buyers and potential clients for native campaigns.

The workshop was a success and a good start to SAMIP’s capacity building initiatives which will see more workshops and trainings taking place throughout 2019.

Cohort highlights

Throughout February our participants also had some successes of their own including:

• Digest founder Dhanyal Davidson, wrote an article on ways to improve managing money which was published by Fin24. The article highlights how readers use Digest to stay informed about finance and economics in South Africa.
• Digest and The Daily Vox provided great coverage and analysis on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address which took place on the 7 February.
• Digest, the Mail & Guardian and the Daily Maverick also provided great coverage and analysis on the Finance Minister’s Budget Speech for 2019 which took place on the 20 February.

As always we are still taking in enquiries on our website, so if you believe you have an innovative news and information organization, product or idea, please submit an enquiry and we promise to respond.

March promises to be another busy month and we look forward to what it brings.