SANEF’s ‘The State of the News Media’ report, 2022

Reg Rumney
Commissioned by the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF)

Against the backdrop of an economy plunged into recession by Covid-19 and then roiled by unrest as it recovered, the news media has had a turbulent time these past two years.

Ironically, the pandemic increased the need for trusted, reliable news as the blow to revenue from declines in advertising and third-stream revenue made life difficult for publishers and the public broadcaster, as SANEF’s [Covid 19 Impact on Journalism] interim report in 2020 detailed.

Retrenchments and newspaper closures or rationalisation of titles and circulation cutbacks continued through 2021.

The print sector was hardest hit by the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and continued to suffer the effects long after as readers lost the habit of buying newspapers or voted with their Rands against content that did not satisfy their wants and needs.

Circulations of major newspapers audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation fell across the board in the last quarter of 2021 compared to the last quarter of 2019, before the pandemic hit hard – though some publications fell more than others.

Local papers audited showed some variance but overall were also down. Community or small commercial media print publications were reported to be knocked by the pandemic, but no hard figures are available.

The problem with the decline in print is that newspapers still produce a great deal of the news as well as the revenue of news organisations from copy sales and advertising. As newspapers have migrated online, they have found online ad revenue far lower than print ad revenue, as Google and Facebook receive the lion’s share of online revenue.

These two internet giants also, in the view of publishers, benefit unfairly from news content shared on the platforms and South African publishers have taken them to the Competition Commission to try to, in their view, put matters right and be compensated.

As print news media declines and news deserts threaten, the idea of a new version of the defunct South African Press Agency (SAPA), which supplied a steady stream of news from around the country for decades, has been suggested.

This report finds a South Africa-focused news agency is a promising project, though it needs a champion, and the failure of news wires connected to the Big 4 publishers (Media24, Independent Newspapers, Arena Holdings, Caxton) to take off suggests it needs state and/or donor funding to get off the ground.

TV news received a significant boost during the pandemic. The figures tell their own story, with a notable increase in TV news viewers. However, the pandemic TV viewership bump was followed by some decline in 2021.

Radio listenership, and along with that the radio news audience, seems robust, though measurement problems prevented precise tracking. Using ad spend as a proxy, radio might have suffered a slight decline in 2021 to TV’s benefit.

The pandemic accelerated the move from print to online news with a surge of new viewers, though this seems to have levelled off in 2021 and was not equally distributed. A big beneficiary of the move online was news24, which adopted a subscription model in 2020.

Although most people, judging from the figures for TV news alone, probably get their news from TV and radio, online news is making inroads. Online news, which has low barriers to entry, has also seen the entry of new online-only outlets.

Among the online-only outlets are non-profit, donor-funded news organisations. This sector has contributed significantly to deepening news coverage, and donor-funding protected it from the pandemic-induced advertising drought.

Nominally non-profit is community radio, which boasts around 280 stations across the country. These range from those that compete with commercial radio to stations to those which the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), responsible for community media, confesses will never be commercially viable.

Indeed, the MDDA pumped noteworthy amounts of money into the sector in emergency funding during the pandemic – over and above the money it already spends each year.

Amid global debates about the role government should play in ensuring media sustainability, MDDA funding shows that government is already funding media, and underlines the need for transparency in any further funding by, for instance, diversion of government advertising spend to any media organisations.

The advertising drought was identified as the key problem for news media during the lockdown period and it recovered well, showing a 16% increase in 2021 against 2020. As long as it stays a major source of revenue for news media, how advertising is allocated and to whom will be contentious.

Advertising, the report notes, is supposed to achieve a purpose for the advertiser rather than being a subsidy.

What this study also reminds us is that the advertising industry is one of most important public sources of measurement of news media as well as underpinning all but the non-profit news sector, despite attempts by news organisations to diversify revenue streams through media and non-media activities and by increasing subscription revenue.

Finally, in the light of international examination of what can be done to make news media
sustainable, including state funding, this report looks at the defining characteristics of public interest news, the all-important flow of verified and verifiable information the society and economy depend on.

• This study follows SANEF’s interim report in 2020, and comes four years after the Paying the Piper report, a comprehensive review of a wide range of research papers and studies commissioned during 2016 and 2017 as part of establishing the Digital Journalism Research Project at Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies.
• Paying the Piper examined threats to the very existence of a diverse and professional South African news media, aimed at taking stock of commercial, non-profit, government and public-service media from the point of view of audience.
• Over the years, much research has focused on the supply-side of news media, including diversity of ownership and funding mechanisms. Not enough attention has been given to the demand-side, that is the all-important audience, without which journalists and editors are speaking into the void
• Without ignoring the structure of South Africa’s mass news media, this research aimed to be audience-centric. In line with that, it focused on a review and analysis of the audiences and audience measurement as an initial step in assessing of the state of the South African news media, in other words the demand side of the business – business in the broadest sense, not simply commerce – of news.
• It does not revisit in any detail the supply side of the news media that has exercised the imagination of some members of the governing party, such as ownership status of news media and the supposed dominance of the Big 4 publishers, since that seems to have changed little, so far at least, since the advent of the pandemic in South Africa.
• The aim is to produce an evidence-based view of the changed and changing South African news media landscape, not as an academic exercise but as a basis for action by various stakeholders.
• The resulting document will be used as the basis for further policy and industry proposals to put South African news media on the path towards sustainability. Its starting point will be the SANEF Covid-19 impact report of June 2020.
• Read the full report here.
• Reg Rumney is a Research Associate at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University and a member of the Press Council’s Appeals Panel Board of Adjudicators