We can save journalism in South Africa, but only if we recognise its role

The Competition Commission’s findings on digital platforms offered South African publishers something rare: acknowledgment that the market is broken. Although platforms accentuated the decline, they didn’t cause the market failure we are experiencing.

There is only one way to adequately restore a market, and this is a policy intervention that incentivises and supports journalism as a public good.

When the Competition Commission ruled that Google pay R688-million over five years as compensation for value extracted from the news industry, emotions were mixed. The compensation and acknowledgement of a distorted market brought some relief, but the inexplicable absolution of Meta’s algorithmic deprecation of news content and the failure to combat misinformation in the past decade frustrated those who have watched platforms act with impunity.

These findings matter, but let’s be clear about what they are and aren’t. They’re not handouts: they’re regulatory attempts to correct market distortions caused by dominant players. And although they won’t save the industry, they provide breathing room for publishers to reposition for sustainability rather than merely survive.

The question is whether we’ll use that window wisely.

The AI paradox

The platforms that disrupted journalism are now being disrupted themselves. Large language models and searches powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are changing how people access information.

Already, Google’s AI Overviews are cutting referral traffic to publishers by double digits. For an industry that spent a decade pivoting to digital, watching that digital strategy come under more strain is cruel timing.

But AI presents opportunity as much as threat. Publishers who figure out how to deploy these tools to better serve audiences, expand coverage more efficiently and conduct investigations that once required specialist data skills will have advantages over their human and machine competitors. The newsrooms that thrive will be those producing audience-centric, original, value-creating journalism that AI cannot replicate.

This matters because AI-generated content is flooding the internet. The antidote isn’t to compete with machines on volume or speed. It’s to double down on what humans do that algorithms cannot: cultivate sources, exercise judgement, hold power accountable and produce journalism that helps people navigate life. Originality and integrity become competitive advantages in an ocean of synthetic content.

The public good we refuse to fund

Journalism is a public good, but it’s not funded like other public goods. The free market notoriously underinvests in public goods and information, so it’s no surprise that American studies in the ’80s and ’90s showed that even in times of growing revenues and economic activity, profitable publishers failed to invest in newsrooms.

We have lost more than half of our colleagues to this disruption, and it is clear the invisible hand of the free market has gone limp. The profit motive will not produce enough of the journalism society needs. It never did, so we need a new approach.

South Africa, better than most countries, can quantify what’s at stake. The investigative reporting that exposed State Capture helped trigger a series of events that led to asset recoveries in the billions, and the removal and prosecutions of senior officials that changed the country’s trajectory. The value recovered (and saved) for the nation dwarfs anything the publishers or whistleblowers received for taking those risks. Many of us operated on a shoestring while generating returns for the country that ran into billions, possibly more.

This is the market failure in its starkest form: journalism creates enormous public value that publishers cannot monetise. Citizens, businesses and the government itself contribute almost nothing to its production, but they are the biggest beneficiaries when corrupt tenders are exposed and officials are removed from power.

If many publishers in the most developed and prosperous countries of the north are struggling, the environment for African publishers is outright inhospitable. A 2023 study by FT Strategies calculated a market favourability score for participating countries, and it’s no surprise that it is 10 times harder to sustain journalism in Africa than in northern Europe. Market context explains why The New York Times has 10 million subscribers and isn’t in northern Uganda. Market context dictates the kind of business model and revenue streams you can pursue.

The local crisis no one sees

National titles do grab attention, but the deeper crisis is local. Streets explode in Johannesburg and make news for a few days, but the months of local muckraking required to see the story through doesn’t happen.

Rising urbanisation, declining municipal governance and crumbling service delivery are part of our realities. These stories go uncovered because the newspapers that once reported on them no longer exist due to economic disruption and the political hijacking of newsrooms.

Communities that once had reporters attending council meetings now have none. Corruption that would have been exposed goes undetected. Maladministration that would have been challenged proceeds unchecked.

Local journalism was our accountability infrastructure and it now lies potholed and broken. Its collapse leaves citizens without the information they need to hold local power to account. The consequences compound silently, invisible precisely because no one is there to make them visible.

Policy or demise: No third option

The Competition Commission’s remedies and initiatives like the Digital News Transformation Fund provide short-term relief. Some publishers will stabilise. A few may even grow. But unless the underlying market context changes, the long-term trajectory remains downward.

Only policy reform can alter this context. South Africa has a framework ready: 19 recommendations developed by the Government Communication Information System with industry input. It covers tax incentives for readers and advertisers, development finance for publishers, zero-rated data for news content, and protections against vexatious lawsuits. It could be the most comprehensive journalism sustainability framework any developing democracy has produced.

The obstacle isn’t design, it’s execution. South Africa has a poor record of translating good policy into functioning programmes and it remains to be seen whether we can bridge the gap.

No amount of innovation will overcome a market that systematically undervalues public interest journalism. No pivot will outrun platforms that keep changing the rules. No subscription strategy will work in communities where poverty makes discretionary spending impossible.

South Africa can lead the world in demonstrating how a developing democracy sustains its press. The framework exists. The evidence base is strong. The constitutional recognition of journalism’s democratic role is explicit. What’s missing is the political will to execute and an industry united enough to demand it.

The window the Competition Commission has opened won’t stay open forever. The question isn’t whether journalism deserves saving, it’s whether we understand the dynamics of markets and if we have the will to employ the only mechanism that can save this critical cornerstone of society. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.