Newspapers in South Africa — chronicle of a death foretold

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.

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.