by Andrew Trench
The rapid decline of South Africa’s print journalism industry poses a significant threat to democracy, community cohesion, and informed public discourse, demanding urgent support for digital media to preserve the integrity and watchdog role of journalism.
Unless you are a journalist or an editor you probably aren’t losing much sleep over South Africa’s shrinking media industry, but there are many reasons to be afraid of what comes next.
When Media24 announced that it plans to shutter the print editions of Rapport, Beeld, City Press, Daily Sun and Soccer Laduma, that news must have torn out the hearts of the journalists there.
I know how painful it is to shut down a publication because two newspapers I edited died in the cruel entropy that is consuming the profession that I still love. Journalism is not a job – it is a love affair which utterly consumes you.
As a former media executive, I am aware of the cold realities of the industry, and I’m not going to contest Media24’s reasons for its decision. It is, however, tragic that Rapport, today a whisker away from overtaking its old nemesis, the Sunday Times, as the largest print circulation weekend paper, should fall before crossing that line.
What haunts me is that few appear to appreciate the consequences of this contracting industry and the declining profession of journalism.
Here are some hard facts. Total paid daily newspaper circulation in SA today is around 150,000 – or around 200,000 if you count copies which are given away for free – according to first quarter 2024 figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation. In 2011 daily paid circulation in SA was around 1.4m, so daily print circulation has collapsed by about 90% over the past 13 years.
Today, the combined circulation of all daily titles is less than what the Daily Sun used to sell on its own (around 374,000 a day).
But as the medium of print declines, readership has exploded on digital platforms, with an estimated 12m South Africans consuming news via digital platforms, a massively conservative number as this figure is only for those who access news via social media as a first port of call.
So, there is no audience problem for journalism in South Africa. However because print media has anchored the business models of traditional media companies, most of the journalism jobs were located within those businesses. They have plummeted as those operations contracted or moved to digital-only platforms. Revenue in digital is a pittance compared to what print used to produce.
One estimate cited by Daily Maverick is that up to 70% of media industry jobs have been lost over the last 15 years. That is an alarming number as South Africa faces a reshaping political landscape and a rising tendency towards ill-considered populism often fuelled by fake news and deliberate disinformation. If ever there was a need for professional journalism it is now.
We often hear people proclaim that people will not pay for news but a more pertinent question to ask is why South Africans stopped paying for news. After all, in 2011 there were some 1.4m people who were paying every day for news in the form of a daily print newspaper which they had delivered to their homes or bought elsewhere. They did not expect their news to be free.
Today perhaps about 400,000 South Africans are paying for news from local media if you calculate that News24 and Netwerk24 have about 200,000 digital subscribers, include another 40,000 or so for other digital news subscriptions elsewhere in the industry, and include the 150,000 or so who still pay for a newspaper every day.
Somewhere out there are the other one million or so people from all sectors of society who in the not-so-distant past saw enough value in news that they dug into their wallets daily to pay for it.
Where did they go? Perhaps paying for Netflix, Spotify or home broadband has diverted that spend? Perhaps a lightweight general sense of the news derived from headlines and chatter on social media is enough news to satisfy a previous appetite, which people paid to satiate.
You might shrug and ask yourself why you should care. Surely this is simply the natural – if rather brutal – evolution (or, in this case, devolution) of an industry.
Many industries have faced similar upheavals like the rise of e-commerce in retail, or transportation with the arrival of electric vehicles and ride-hailing platforms, or music and the emergence of streaming platforms.
But the difference is that media, unlike other disrupted industries, is really the thin line between sanity and chaos.
The contraction in the number of journalists and the narrowing scope of coverage creates an anarchic landscape that threatens to fracture our society, which currently hangs on a fragile agreement between competing political parties.
As the trolls of social media breathe the air left by professional journalism and generative artificial intelligence emerges, new perils loom which were previously unimagined.
For example, I was astonished recently to witness when working with a client a “media” inquiry drafted by artificial intelligence for a platform powered by bots and whose only purpose is to suck up automated advertising spend by harvesting clicks around stories trending on social media.
That was a chilling glimpse into a toxic future we could not have imagined even two years ago.
This comes as the recent Reuters Digital News Report 2024 noted that in South Africa, fear over misinformation has grown to 81%, an increase of six percentage points over the previous year and well above the global average of 59%. At the same time, trust in news is stable at 57%.
This shows that the decline in diversity within media and among those who produce professional journalism coincides with increasing fear among South Africans over fake news. The irony is rich and sad.
Meanwhile, social media platforms – the petri dishes of weaponised fake information and the citadels of misguided keyboard warriors – continue to grow, leaving exposed corporate, political, social and other “attitude objects” to borrow a term from academia.
Let us consider for example the implications for corporates on a contracting professional media environment. A study by Dutch researchers published in 2020 in the journal Mass Communication & Society shows there are empirical links between visibility and tone of coverage and corporate reputation. Other research shows correlations between media coverage and a company’s market value.
For the business world, an under-served media environment risks an over-emphasis of negative coverage and a resulting outsized impact on reputations. The Dutch study found the “effect of negative news is three times larger than the effect of positive news”.
An underserved media environment makes managing reputations or indeed building one at all significantly more difficult.
But many organisations play other roles and act on other issues besides their own reputations. They engage in national or industry specific dialogues, in policymaking and in the political sphere and that is becoming more challenging within a diminished media landscape and its waning impact on the public agenda.
The ecosystemic which drives dialogue, debate, insights and accountability is collapsing not because of the change in consumption patterns from print publications to digital platforms but because the people who create journalism are disappearing.
Journalists and editors will often point to the watchdog role of media as an important contributor to society but there is more to it than that. Also vital is the bread-and-butter stuff like covering the local city council or the magistrate’s court or the residents’ association AGM.
These little things are the building blocks of a community’s story, and a community without a story is not a community at all. “News deserts” is the term which describes this phenomenon and research that is being done into the impact of these “deserts” shows that affected communities start to lack cohesion and identity.
Things begin to fall apart on the back of decreased civic engagement, which has been linked to declining voter turnout, less government accountability and, predictably, rising misinformation. Sound familiar?
So, this is why we all should care about what is happening in South African media.
If you were once a reader who had a newspaper subscription, it’s time to swipe your card and support a digital publication or two. If you run a business, tell your marketing agency to also direct spend towards supporting our local media organisations rather than only pouring more cash into the pockets of Facebook and Google.
What you will gain by supporting South African journalism is worth far more than it will cost you when the last journalist lays down their pen.
By Andrew Trench
A former editor and media executive who now runs Trenchant Media Solutions and is an associate of Bairds CMC, an international strategic communications and management consultancy.