My heart was heavy last week when I saw reports that Media24 was considering the closure of the print editions of some of its most storied newspapers. I was sad, but not surprised.
Media24 bosses have neither confirmed nor denied the reports that they would stop the print versions of Beeld, Rapport, City Press and Daily Sun, but their equivocation tells one that the matter is under discussion and it is probably only a question of how soon they will move entirely online. We have known for some years that print newspapers were dying as readers and advertisers moved online and the cost of printing and distribution became prohibitive. Other major print titles are likely to follow soon.
It is the chronicle of a death long foretold, to quote Gabriel García Márquez. But the inevitability of it makes it no less painful.
After 44 years in journalism, rooted in the newspaper industry, I am of course nostalgic for the days when the better print products served up edited and curated news with a thoughtfulness, design and care that you seldom get with the online product. Some of these papers, one must not forget, had dark and dubious histories, playing a central role in supporting or whitewashing apartheid. But the better ones exposed and challenged, criticised and provoked, and played a role in apartheid’s demise.
On the internet, on the other hand, it usually feels like one has to wade through a mass of frantically compiled information of variable quality and depth and you are left to find – often only by luck – what is actually worth consuming.
Most newspapers have an identity and a social role that seldom survives in the online version. Print papers were a part of our city, community and family lives and identities, very different to when everyone is staring down at different news sources on their phones. At their best, print newspapers led and shaped the news and set the political and social agenda – admittedly not always well – but these days you often don’t know if the news you are getting is genuine or something dreamed up by an anonymous psychotic in a windowless basement.
What one misses most as one trawls through the internet is the sense that someone has done an intelligent sifting of the vast mass of information, letting you know what you need to know (and not just what you want to know), balanced matters of public interest with entertainment, cut it to the length it deserves, taken care to cast it in decent and readable language (sometimes), thrown out the junk and added perhaps a touch of wit. One certainly could not believe everything one read in newspapers, but at least one knew where it came from and the publication had to take responsibility for what it published – unlike the free-for-all internet, where there are no rules and no filtering and the good is often drowned out by the petty, the malign and the plain nonsense.
Our initial naïve belief that the digital world would open up the public debate, give a voice to the voiceless, and democratise information, has been shown to be at best a quarter-truth.
What shapes our news and sets our agenda now are not editors – with all their imperfections and foibles – but secret algorithms which are often programmed to irk and rile you so that you stay engaged and keep consuming what they throw at you. We are invited to a hot dog-eating competition rather than a gourmet meal.
Increasingly, the internet is dominated by a few major, global players, and where there is the sense of public purpose that motivated at least some traditional newsrooms, it is on the fringes. Any sense of serving the audience and the public is overridden by the lust to dominate the audience and revenue, and whatever it takes to achieve that.
Without doubt, the internet gives us incalculable value, and access to much more information. For journalists, it provides unparalleled tools for research and investigation. But our initial naïve belief that the digital world would open up the public debate, give a voice to the voiceless, and democratise information, has been shown to be at best a quarter-truth. We find ourselves at the mercy of all-powerful and unaccountable global platforms and soulless algorithms that reflect the purpose, prejudices and peccadillos of their owners and designers. In between, one can find some excellent journalism, but these examples are few and far between, mostly the big global Western voices that cater to an international elite – not the range and diversity we thought the internet would give us.
Part of this is what digital economy analyst Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification of the internet”. He wrote in Wired magazine in 2023:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, with the nature of a ‘two-sided market’, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
Apart from the online news sites, it looks like quite soon all we will have is the SABC, perhaps one other television news channel, and the independent specialist units and outlets that depend on philanthropic funding.
We may hope for better information and news from the internet, but, Doctorow warns us, the trend is towards flooding the information market with more and more shit, which is cheaper, easier and more lucrative to produce.
If we were just mourning the loss of some newspaper titles, that would pass quickly. But these threatened closures signal the crumbling of our news industry. There are already fewer news sources, fewer newsrooms and fewer journalists, and this latest development is a quickening of this process. Already our local, community media – a key element of the news ecology which feeds small stories into the big media – has shrunk considerably. Now we are seeing the decimation and even collapse of many of our larger newsrooms coming sooner than expected.
And it is not as if our local online options are strong and stable: they suffer from the fact that the bulk of online advertising revenue is swept up by the giant platforms, such as Google and Facebook.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Daily Maverick founders call on Competition Commission to ensure fairness in skewed media sector
Read more in Daily Maverick: News industry meltdown — market failure or creative destruction?
Apart from the online news sites, it looks like quite soon all we will have is the SABC, perhaps one other television news channel, and the independent specialist units and outlets that depend on philanthropic funding, some of whom are doing – thank goodness - the strongest journalism in the country. How ironic that the most stable media institutions are those who rely on funding.
There are many animal metaphors one can use to highlight the importance of media to our society: it is our watchdog to expose wrongdoing and abuse of power, the canary in our coalmine to warn us of dangers, the guide dog that leads us along the path of our lives, the pigeon that carries our messages; the nightingale that sings our tunes. Without our media, our democracy and economy will be weaker, our lives less rich.
If we don’t wake up and see that the news media is another public utility – like water and electricity – that we need to fix and make work, we are in serious trouble. How we fix it, though, must be the subject of another article. DM
Anton Harber was one of the founders of the Weekly Mail (now the Mail & Guardian).