MDDA report outlines challenges, ambitions in building South Africa’s mass media
PICTURE: Kyle Loftus/Pexels
South Africa’s Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) has officially launched its Community Media Sustainability Report in Johannesburg, to outline its ongoing efforts to promote sustainable community media, and to discuss the positive impact its shared initiatives have in fostering diversity, inclusivity, and media empowerment.
The MDDA was established to facilitate ownership, control and access to information and content production of the community media by historically disadvantaged communities.
Despite it being in existence for more than 20 years, Community and Small Commercial Media (CSCM) organisations have, however, struggled to position their sector as authorities on local content or as the platform to reach often-inaccessible audiences.
This means that community media platforms have not yet been able to convince advertisers of their value for advertising – which is the lifeline for the community media’s sustainability in the long term.
Over time and despite the MDDA’s interventions and support, the CSCM sector is not sustainable, and it continues to face myriad challenges
Given this context, the MDDA appointed Redflank to conduct research focused on identifying the underlying factors that influence the sustainability of the CSCM sector, identifying trends in ownership of CSCM organisations and studying sustainability models adopted in other countries for the CSCM sector.
Ultimately, this research was focused on the development of a Sustainability Model for the CSCM sector.
The approach adopted for this project was premised on assessing the current CSCM landscape in South Africa, in order to determine an improved ecosystem based on the key challenges currently being faced, the success of current CSCM business models and on best practices.
A key element of the approach involved the use of the UNESCO Media Viability Indicators to determine the sustainability of specific CSCM organisations. These Indicators measure sustainability using five societal dimensions – Economics, Politics, Content and Expertise, Technology and Community.
As part of the assessment, each CSCM organisation type was allocated a score out of 100 which served as an indication of the overall level of sustainability for that specific CSCM organisation type. Furthermore, in order to ensure that the specific issues facing the CSCM sector in the South African context were considered, six Sustainability Pillars, developed by the MDDA in order to identify and document specific issues believed to be impacting the sustainability of the CSCM sector, were used to supplement the framework provided by UNESCO.
These Sustainability Pillars included:
• technology, digital innovation and signal distribution
• corporate governance and compliance
• content generation and professionalising the sector through skills and capacity
• transformation of the print media sector
• consolidating government support, and
• audience measurement
At a high level, the root cause analysis revealed that the CSCM sector faces various challenges.
As a result of the socio economic circumstances of their target communities, CSCM organisations do not receive adequate financial support from the communities within which they are located.
CSCM organisations also appear not to be receiving adequate financial or non-financial support from local government. This is compounded by government’s decreasing ability to provide social benefit type grants and decreasing ability to provide financial support to CSCM organisations.
The majority of CSCM organisations appear to be limited by a lack of sufficient revenue. This creates a multitude of other challenges, including:
- the inability to operate effectively due to a lack of key skills and business functions
- the inability to attract advertisers due to a lack of marketing and sales skills, and
- the inability to afford skilled personnel and retain skilled staff, resulting in a high level of staff turnover and creating a perception of ‘instability’ within the sector.
CSCM organisations also face challenges with generating sufficient revenue through advertising. This may be as a result of a lack of market analytics capabilities, which are crucial to provide insight into their respective communities’ buying power and attract advertisers.
High levels of staff turnover within CSCM organisations creates a perception that the sector is unstable, thus impacting the credibility of these organisations, which in turn impacts their ability to attract larger advertisers.
There appear to be significant skills gaps within CSCM organisations, including skills such as business management, sales, marketing and market research. This is often as a result of the organisation’s
inability to pay skilled staff.
Furthermore, as a result of the ‘volunteer’ model, CSCM organisations often have to continuously capacitate and train new volunteers – using up time and resources
CSCM organisations experience challenges relating to inadequate governance. It was found that the improper formation of boards impacts the sustainability of the sector, as there have been instances whereby individuals have been voted onto the boards of CSCM organisations without adequate knowledge of the CSCM sector, leading to conflict between the board and management.
Furthermore, there have been instances where political factors have influenced the formation of the board, with individuals being voted in based on popularity as opposed to their experience or level of skill.
The challenges cited above lead to four fundamental observations as it relates to creating a sustainability model for the CSCM sector
- Economic development needs to occur for CSCM organisations to find long-term sustainability
- The role-players in the CSCM sector need to provide more support, financial or non-financial, to CSCM organisations to bolster sustainability
- CSCM organisations need to reduce their operating costs, especially where revenue is constrained, and
- CSCM organisations need access to key skills to attract more advertising revenue (and to diversify their revenue streams)
The MDDA was established through the MDDA Act of 2002 to facilitate ownership, control and access to information and content production of community media by historically disadvantaged communities.
The entity – which is funded through annual government grants and from commercial broadcasters’ Universal Service and Access Fund USAF levies, imposed on them.
At the forefront of the transformation of the mass media in South Africa, MDDA has funded at least 160 community broadcasters (including four TV broadcasters), and 33 community and 45 small commercial print operations over the past 17 years.
Audiences for these broadcasters and publications generally include, but are not limited to, communities who are historically disadvantaged and who speak historically diminished languages, which are often not catered for by the mainstream media.
