We ignore the changes happening in the media space I’ve inhabited for the past 20 years at our collective peril.
Despite it being very much in vogue to lambaste “MSM” (that’s mainstream media if you’ve been under a digital rock, dear reader) for being the vanguard of some laughable global elite agenda, and the far more serious threat of social media eating the media world, there’s a growing realisation that democracy needs the fourth estate — even if that estate is more digital than before.
There’s value in investigating, fact-checking, copy editing and proofreading before publishing the words that are often intended to hold the powerful and unscrupulous to account.
I started my career when the Cortésites were shouting “burn the boats”, thinking we’ll never need those printing presses again with the world recovering from the dot.com implosion and realising that the internet was a useful tool. Sort of like what X is today, full of useful tools.
While much of the traditional media has moved online and I hold no crystal ball for the future of print (Ray Dalio cautions that those who live by crystal balls will end up eating broken glass), the newsroom that powers the multimedia engine remains as vital as it’s ever been. But it’s teetering on the brink. Successive leadership teams have cut far too much of the media’s muscle, along with fat, to withstand the social media ad revenue-guzzling juggernaut.
The business media was hit by a double whammy when the JSE changed its listing requirements in the early 2000s, allowing companies to publish shorter-form financial results in newspapers. This eventually saw all of that shifting online and I would guess roughly a quarter of the consistent revenue newspapers banked on disappeared overnight.
Then came the social media companies and search engine giants hoovering up the news produced by traditional newsrooms for free, “aggregating” it for their users and feeding it to them via their data-rich algorithms. Why place an ad in a single newspaper when one ad on Facebook would be like taking an ad in every newspaper and publication you could find?
While I admit to having no specific research insight to bolster my next argument — call it a hunch developed over years of sniffing through stories and poring over trends — I think trust in social media has reached its zenith and the decline will be almost impossible to stop in an age in which artificial intelligence (AI), disinformation, propaganda, algorithm-augmented echo chambers and the like turn readers away and back into the arms of the trusted traditional media model of “facts are sacred, comment is free”. The time-tested art of cross-referencing data, corroborating information with multiple sources and meticulously checking every detail to avoid misinformation.
Richard Fletcher, senior research fellow with the Reuters Institute, examined the challenges and trends related to paid online news a few years ago. While there has been a slight increase in the number of people paying for online news, most of the growth is concentrated in major publications such as The New York Times and Financial Times, as well as alternative models such as the membership scheme at The Guardian.
Challenges remain, including the potential upper limit of subscribers and the risk of “subscription fatigue”, with consumers growing weary of paying for multiple services. This raises concerns about whether only the largest outlets will survive and how smaller news platforms will fare in future.
He also explores the possibility of “information inequality”, which refers to a divide between those who can afford to pay for news and those who cannot. Interestingly, the data shows that paying subscribers still consume free news and that in countries with strong public broadcasters, such as Norway, news consumption quality remains more equal. However, in the US, where public service media is weaker, there is a notable trust gap between the news diets of paying and nonpaying users. We could hardly call the SABC a strong public broadcaster in SA.
Somewhere in a tech-filled office, a fund manager is patting themself on the back for chasing their bet on Meta and Alphabet. Meanwhile, the so-called old guard traditional media companies are struggling to keep the lights on. But here’s the thing: if you care about environmental, social & governance (ESG) issues and you say you care about governance, transparency, and accountability then you’re missing the bigger picture.
Investing in traditional media isn’t just a nostalgic exercise — it’s an imperative. And frankly it’s a bet on truth, accountability and the long-term health of markets. While social media might give you clicks, it’s the newspapers, the investigative reporters and the editors that are keeping the wolves at bay.
You want to invest in governance? Invest in the companies that uncover corporate fraud. You want to invest in transparency? Invest in the journalists who dig into financial statements and expose the truth. Social media won’t do that for you. It might give you a hashtag, but it won’t give you governance. It might give you engagement, but it won’t give you accountability.
That doesn’t mean newsrooms don’t get it wrong. But increasingly the mistakes we are witnessing stem from an under-resourced system with too few senior hacks covering an ever-expanding beat. Traditional media holds the line. Invest in it, before it’s too late.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at Badger@businesslive.co.za.
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