SABC ordered to reinstate 7 of the "#SABC8," Vuyo Mvoko excluded

After what has been a rather turbulent few weeks at the SABC, the broadcaster late this afternoon announced plans to reinstate 7 of the 8 journalists it dismissed for speaking out against the broadcaster's plan to no longer cover destructive protests. 

The SABC, under the reigns of COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng, last week defied a court order by locking out four of the journalists after being ordered to reinstate them. At the time, the SABC planned to appeal the court order, but such plans has since been dropped.

The reinstated journalists are:

• Thandeka Gqubule (economics editor)
• Busisiwe Ntuli (Special Assignment executive producer) 
• Lukhanyo Calata (SABC parliamentary correspondent)
•  Krivani Pillay (SAfm current affairs executive producer)
• Foeta Krige (RSG executive editor)
• Jacques Steenkamp (senior investigative journalist)
• Suna Venter (senir journalist)

The most senior member of the SABC8, contributing editor, Vuyo Mvoko, has not been reinstated (well at least not yet). Mvoko authored an article that appeared in Independent Newspapers  titles in which he criticised the SABC's policies, a move his lawyer called protecting the broadcaster. The brodcaster then terminated his contract for bringing the broadcast into disrepute. 

Mvoko has since applied to the Johannesburg High Court for the enforcement of his contract. The only reason a decision on him was not made today is because he is being legally represented separately from the rest of the "SABC8."

[Personally, it is elections next week and I am really going to miss Mvoko not playing a major role in that day's broadcasts as he always does on major political news days.]

Supersport announces Olympic broadcast plans

On a fancy boat party in Durban yesterday, Supersport announced their broadcast plans for the upcoming Rio Olympics. The plans are summarised below:

Channel	Minimum Bouquet	Sports
Supersport4	Compact	Opening ceremony, swimming, athletics, marathon, walk, closing ceremony.
Supersport 5	Premium	Hockey, handball, volleyball (beach and indoors), gymnastics, trampoline.
Supersport 6	Premium	Tennis, basketball, four cycling disciplines, table tennis, badminton.
Supersport 7	Premium	Boxing, weight lifting, judo.
Supersport12	Premium	Olympic News Channel.
Supersport13	Premium	Watersport: rowing, diving, etc.
Supersport14	Premium	Fencing, modern pentathlon, equestrian.

Even though the latter three are currently not available in South Africa, they will be made available for the Olympics. If you wondering why Supersport 10 and 11 are skipped, 10 is a sports channel focussing on Nigerian sport whilst 11 will be used exclusively for English Premier League in the rest of Africa.

All channels will be available in High Definition.

The soccer tournament will be shown on Supersport 3, but not exclusively.

The rugby and golf tournaments will be shown on Supersport 1, but not exclusively.

Every gold medal event will be shown live on Supersport.

SuperSport will also have roving reporters in Rio with Crystal Arnold, Carol Tshabalala, James Wokabi and Rui de Oliveira (Portuguese) reporting directly from various venues and the team village. Former Olympic champion, Ryk Neethling, will once again report from poolside.

In addition, Supersport will be producing Ola Rio, a magazine show that will be produced from Rio.

SABC News refreshes lower thirds

When election  season comes around, news channels usually refresh their onscreen appearance as the race for ratings heats up. This week, the SABC News Channel, along with the SABC's news bulletins across the entity's free to air channels.

The group joins the latest flat and colourful craze, just like eNCA does, in its new on screen presentation. Also new are the info screens used to display the financial stats.

The titles remain unchanged whilst the colour of the credits has changed.

Afrikaans SABC News anchor resigns

Ivor Price, who is one of the anchors of SABC2's daily Afrikaans news bulletin, today announced his resignation from the public broadcaster.

The reason for him leaving? He says his conscience no longer allows him to remain silent in light of all things happening at the SABC.

In addition to being a SABC2 anchor, Price also presented the breakfast show at Afrikaans station, RSG.

Whilst emplyed by the SABC, Price had always been one of the organisation's reporters who were brave enough to speak out about the happenings there. He tweeted the news of his resignation not too long after tweeting that the last member of the "SABC 8" had been fired.

SABC launches local government elections show

[Forgive me for not posting about this sooner]

Along with shifting news bulletins around and new show launches, the 4th of July also saw the launch of the SABC's traditional election build up show.

'Election 2016,' as it is referred to, is a daily 30 minute election news roundup and daily topic analysis anchored by Morning Live's Leanne Manas, who is joined by Simphiwe Ncongwane. These two are joined on set by Thabiso Sithole who tends to do the in depth interviews. It airs from 6pm on both SABC2 (in the former slot of the multilingual news bulletin) and SABC News Channel (in place of the first half hour of Prime Time News). In addition, it repeats at midnight on both channels and is also uploaded onto SABC News' Youtube channel.

The show is broadcast live from the new studio that was launched for the rugby world cup last year. At the time, I said it may not be the best sports studio in the country (nothing comes close to what is done at Supersport), but it is by far the best studio among the news broadcasters.

The show also encourages viewer interaction by asking viewers to tweet a reply to their daily question using the hashtag #SABCElection2016.

The first segment of the show follows the format of a general news bulletin, but with an election focus, followed by an in depth piece and discussion about a specific topic in the second segment. This is then followed by a minute of members of the public answering a question about the elections. The final segment starts with an SABC Election tradition of giving a smaller party a minute to sell themselves to the public.

The show joins ANN7's SA Decides as so far the only two daily dedicated election news bulletins in the country.

ANN7 announces 2016 South African of the Year Awards

ANN7 today announced the launch of the channel's 2016 South African of the Year Awards campaign, with the theme of 'Reflection and Progression.'

Going against tradition of holding the event around the time of the channel's birthday, this yeard edition will be held in November again at the Ticketpro Dome.

The SATY awards categories have been tweaked a bit for 2016 and are as follows:
Music Artist of the Year
Personality of the Year ( TV/Radio/ Film)
Business Innovator of the Year
Sportsperson of the Year
Conservationist of the Year
Youth Leader of the Year
South African of the Year
A Lifetime Achievement award will also be made

Public nominations will be open from 13 July 2016- 05 August 2016. A group of panellists will shortlist 5 finalists from all the nominees in each of the categories. Viewers will have an opportunity to vote for the finalists within the respective categories and the winners will be announced on the evening of the awards.

The Awards' companion show, I Am South African, will also return from August through November (probably to avoid clashing with SA Decides, which shares its timeslot). No host has been announced yet.

RATINGS: DStv news channels for 4-10 July

Thanks to Haranth Ghosh of ANN7, we get the below glimpse into what the average viewership is like for DStv's news channels, even if its only for a few days :


Though we had previously seen audience share, this is the first time we get to see the actual viewership figures.

One major criticism that I have to mention is that the measurement is done out of sync with the domestic news channels (and by far the largest news channels): The domestic news channels run from 6am to midnight, whilst this measurement is from 5am-11pm, leaving an hour of premiering content out, but including repeat content.

Just to quickly explain the graph: the first column describes the channel's total audience share when compared to every tv channel in the country. The obvious reason why these figures are so small is because these news channels are available in about 5 million homes (I will analyse this figure in the next paragraph), most of which has over 60 tv channels, whereas a major channel like SABC1 is available in excess of 20 million homes (I do not have the actual figure, but its much higher than 20 million), most of which only has 5 tv channels (the three SABC channels, eTV and the community channel in that area).
The next column is the actual viewership. A bit of math reveals the coutry's average amount of tv viewers across all channels is just under 17 million viewers at a given time, on average.
The final column is the percentage of audience share among news channels only.

From the above we can see that eNCA continues to average over 50% of the market share (Recently revealed stats show its the 6th most watched channel on all of DStv). What makes this figure even more impressive is that eNCA is available in only about 2.5 million households compared to 5 million for SABC News Channel and ANN7. In Naspers' (DStv's parent company) recent results, it showed that roughly 50% of DStv subscribers are collectively on DStv Premium, Compact and Extra, equating to about 2.5 million viewers and eNCA is available only on these bouquets, compared to all bouquets for the other domestic news channels.

The race to second place is heating up with SABC News Channels' viewership share seemingly stagnating while ANN7 is now on its heels.

For some odd reason, British news channel, Sky News, is in a close fourth place, whilst CNN has a marginal lead among international channels.

These viewership figures will get more interesting as the local elections approach.

[NOTE: These viewership figures include those watching on DStv in South Africa only. It excludes eNCA's viewers in the rest of Southern Africa and online, SABC News Channel's viewership in the rest of the continent, and ANN7's online viewership]

Yusuf Omar out at eNCA

Yusuf Omar has left eNCA as the channel continues to lose highly talented on air personell.

Earlier this year Omar's unique style of reporting landed him on Cliffcentral's inaugural #Kellman20. Reporter,Ruby Chikwiri wrote, "A forerunner in his industry, Yusuf is not constrained by the norm. He is instead breaking barriers by marrying technology together with journalism. A true storyteller. He lives through his journalism and has immersed himself in the art of “snack media”."


He leaves eNCA to take up the position of editor at the Hindustan Times, overseeing in excess of 700 mobile journalists.

ANN7 adds new weekend sports show to schedule

ANN7's marketing Twitter account (the only one of its kind in the country) today tweeted that the channel will be launching a new weekend sports show this weekend, The Beuatiful Game.

The show, which will look at Soccer news from South Africa and abroad, will be anchored by current weekend breakfast show anchor, Liezle Wilson, Tholakele Mnganga, a sports journo at PowerFM, and Lenn Yarmolenko.

The broadcast times of the show is odd though.  The morning broadcast is live at 10:30am, but it then gets repeated at 9:30pm when it will be previewing games that have aired already.

The show joins ANN7's other sports shows, the weekday GameOn! and the weekend Weekend Sports.

ANN7 without a programming guide: Does the guide even matter?

So ANN7's electronic programming guide on dstv.com and DStv' iPlate is finally back today after a week without it, but in the end, was it really ever missed?

A television channel, regardless of genre, without a programming guide is expected to rate poorly as viewers struggle to find their way around the schedule, yet ANN7 has trended positively on Twitter more times this week than I can ever recall (excluding SATY weekends). These were trends for reporting news and not trends for negative things at the channel.

This must mean that viewers are still watching the channel, even more than before if it is trending, so what gives?

A news channel's programming guide alerts viewers to what the different news bulletins are that are shown on the screen. When you watch CNNi (DStv 401) for example, if you tune into Quest Means Business at 10pm CAT daily, you expect a business news show with a relaxed tone hosted by Richard Quest from a home-like studio and editorially based in New York. However, when you tune into Connect The World at 5pm, you expect to see an international news bulletin with a Middle Eastern perspective from a newsy studio and editorially produced from Abu Dhabi.

However, when you tune into any programme on one of the local news channels, the look and feel of every news bulletin is exactly the same. The studio setup is the same. The music is the same. The editorial decisions are made by the same people for the full 24 hours of the day. There is really no difference between eNCA's News Night and the mid morning news slot other than the anchors. The same can be said for ANN7 and SABC News Channel.

So, without a programming guide, ANN7 was in fact making things easier for viewers, especially casual ones, who might struggle to navigate between shows like 'News' and 'Newsroom,' even though they are essentially the same, other than for anchors. Though ANN7 has many show names, the only three shows that are essentially different from anything else are SA Decides, GameOn! and Newsroom Live.

Sometimes simplicity is the best way to attract casual viewers.

South African Communist Party protests at eNCA

eNCA reporter, Phakamile Hlubi, particpated in the protest

One really has to consider the state of South African broadcast media when there has been a protest at every single domestic news channel in the past 10 days. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

One of the major issues that were protested today were the IPSOS polling eNCA has been carrying out, and broadcasting, over this last month. The organisation and those who marched along with them want eNCA to immediately pull the polling as they feel it is deceiving.

The major so called deception? The claim by the polls that the ruling African National Congress will lose the Tshwane metro in the upcoming local elections. The party has also given ETV 48 hours to explain why they, the party, should not take etv to the electoral court. They further accused the channel of having a political agender behind the polling.

Electoral polling is considered a highly controversial issue where ever such polls are conducted. In the United States, where polls determine who gets to participate in presidential debates, the polls have been accused of influencing who gets elected considering those who do not meet the made up criteria to enter the debate stage do not get the free and highly valuable publicity that comes along with being on the debate stage.

For example, to be on a presidential debate stage, candidates have to average 15% in polls. The current major third party candidate from the Libertarian Party only has 9% and will not get the exposure of an audience exceeding 60 million.

In India, the same company that carries out the polls for ANN7 was accused of faking the results of the polls in order to influence public perception.

The other major point of contention at the protest was the freedom (or allegedly the lack thereof) of etv staff to join trade unions. Protestors held up placards stating that 'Workers are not free at e,' a play on words with the red letter channel's slogan.

Furthermore, the protest aimed to stop gender discrimination at the channel, due to female staff being prohibited from wearing head scarves on air. In addition, the protestors wanted to address the lack of transformation at the channel, due to allegations that senior positions are always just filled by white individuals.

The protestors delivered a memorandum to management, who actually took time tolisten to them (unlike at ANN7 where the management just looked at them, or at the SABC where Chief Operating Officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng did not come out to see them at all).

eNCA's editor-in-chief, Anton Harber, signed the memorandum and stated that they will read it and consider it carefully.

RATINGS: June free to air highlights

SABC1

• The Xhosa news continues to be the most watched local news bulletin at 4.4 million viewers 
• The Zulu bulletin remains on its tail at 4.3 million viewers. 

SABC2

• The multilingual new bulletin at 6pm continues to be the channels top news bulletin, with its most viewed episode averaging 1.69 million viewers. From this month, this bulletin moves half an hour later.
• The Afrikaans news bulletin pulled 1.47 million viewers. It too moves half hour later this month.
• Afrikaans actuality show, Fokus, pulled 1.16  million viewers. it also moves timeslots this month. 

SABC3

• In a perfect example of slow and steady wins the race, the English bulletin that used to pull 400 000 viewers a few years back now averages just under double that. 
• Actuality show, Special Assignment, pulled 500 000 viewers.

etv

• The Sunday edition of eNew sDirect Headlines continues to make the most of its huge WWE Raw lead in rating, averaging 2.9 million viewers in June. In fact, it is by far the highest rated English bulletin in the  country. 
• That was the only news and actuality show to make etv's top 20. The rest of the list is just local series and international movies (and wrestling, don't forget that). 

It seems to have been a poor onth for actuality shows (or just a strong month for everything else). Usual strong performing shows like Checkpoint and Speak Out, among others, did not feature in their respective channel's top 20 at all. The shows that did chart like Special Assignment, underperformed as well. 

eNCA launches new onscreen graphics

eNCA this past  Monday launched a new graphics package, its second major change since  relaunching under the eNCA name.

The channel's new on air graphics style reflects the growing trend by broadcasters internationally to take on a graphics style similar to the one made famous by Windows 8, referred to as the "Modern User Interface" or simply Metro: flat graphics, bright colours.

The clock is now at the bottom of the screen and both the channel logo and web address are now permanently on the screen as well.

The biggest thing I Noticed about the change is that eNCA no longer caters for viewers with older 4:3 televisions anymore: the graphics only fit fully into a 16:9 widescreen setup, meaning viewers with older television sets will have the graphics cut off at both ends. Also, the onscreen ticker now has a smaller font, making it harder to see on smaller televisions and older televisions.

Its quite common for news channels to refresh their graphics package close to election season.

The channel's weather graphics got a face lift as well, though most of the map's graphics are unchanged.

As always, the age old eNCA tune has been tweaked and modified to go along with the new graphics.

ANN7's program guide blank

Remember back in early May The Sunday Times reported that Multichoice was getting ready to axe ANN7? One reason cited for the rumoured axing is that ANN7's onscreen EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) was often incorrect.

Well, since the start of July, the guide has been totally blank, showing only the above information for days now.

So any viewers that wanted to record weekend programming like Abigail Visagie's Face in the Crowd would either have to record a six hour block of a news channel, or nothing at all. Even just viewing the programming would be difficult as the channels programming schedule changes often.

If no one at the channel takes the channel seriously enough to provide Multichoice with a schedule in over four days now, how do they expect viewers to take them seriously and tune in?