On 17 June South Africa’s Mail & Guardian (M&G) unveiled a new online edition equipped with cutting-edge features and a sophisticated layout to ease online reading and encourage social networking.

In this technologically savvy era, the new site has come at an especially ripe moment in the paper’s growth patterns; the online edition receives an average of 500,000 unique readers and more than four million impressions a month whereas the print edition sells approximately 200,000 copies a month.

“The [print and online editions] actually work together very well, as the weekly newspaper is renowned for being a collection of investigative reporting, comments and analysis, while the website is a daily source of breaking news,” said online editor Riaan Wolmarans of M&G in an interview with RAP 21.

“Our previous site was very old in terms of usability, design and interactivity. We needed a fresh new look and better design to incorporate Web 2.0 elements and make the site more reader-friendly,” said Wolmarans.

“We now have much more higher user interactivity-users can register for free and save story clippings, have news recommended to them, comment below articles and so forth,” said Wolmarans. All of the new attributes have been created to increase social networking opportunities.

Better content organisation also makes it easier for readers to go through articles via semantic tagging and sorting. For example, tag clouds now differentiate subjects, people and places from the breadth of news offered by M&G Online. Articles are now regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city and South African news can be viewed at the town, city or provincial level. Furthermore, all articles are now integrated with Google Maps.

More additions are still brewing at the M&G Online newsroom. Readers will be able to vote for articles or add articles from other sites, use clippings of stories for a clippings blog and add blog and news feeds from other online sources to personal reader dashboards.

Upon full completion, the renovated M&G website will facilitate multi-platform dialogue between the many online readers of one of South Africa’s leading newspapers.

The new website can be viewed at http://www.mg.co.za/