No news is bad news as media houses flounder in the digital age

“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.” – Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Since 2012, the number of countries surveyed in the Reuters Institute’s report on the state of digital news has grown from five to 38, and this is the first year that South Africa, or indeed any African country, has been included. We could ask a few political questions about bias and choice, but in truth one reason we haven’t been including until now could be as simple as this: we aren’t very important.

Despite all the resources that news organisations in South Africa wield, we’ve come up with nothing original or interesting to break the stranglehold that US platforms have over our industry. This is in contrast to the leaps African countries have made in other digital arenas, such as banking. Time is running out for us. Unless we take advantage of local audience peculiarities, such as language or data network configurations, we’ll be in the same place as much of the rest of the world’s traditional news media: eviscerated and hanging on by the grace of Google.

In my darker moments, I think of the overweening US platforms as colonising powers, colonising powers that are more analogous to great religious movements than empires. In the same way that Christianity was the thinking and community platform that enabled the colonisation of people (a necessary prerequisite to the colonisation of a country, as the great Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga reminds us in the epigraph above) the US social media platforms are the engine that drives the (perhaps unconscious) digital imperialism of the West.

Subscription models aren’t going to save news organisations

For better or worse, news is part of the entertainment industry. On a perhaps related note, 32% of people say they actively avoid the news, up six percentage points overall from two years ago. Reasons for avoiding the news are because it has a negative effect on their mood (58%) or because they feel powerless to change events. South Africa is above the global average, at 37%. When asked what they would pick if they could have only one online media subscription for the next year, 37% of under-45s said online video (like Netflix), 15% said online music, and a paltry 7% opted for a news subscription.

The average level of global trust in the news in general is down two percentage points to 42%, and less than half (49%) agree that they trust the news media they themselves use. Trust in the news found via search (33%) and social media (23%) is stable but very low. In South Africa, overall trust in the news most of the time is 48%, 10th place in the 38-country survey (higher than the UK, US and Australia). People trust the brands they use a bit more (54%) but they are much less likely to trust the news they find on social media (28%). Scarily, 70% of the South African sample say they struggle to separate fact from fiction online – one of the highest figures in the international survey.

Breaking news is literally doing that

A casualty of the news industry’s desperate rush for eyeballs has been that people now see the media as doing a better job at breaking news than at explaining it. Perhaps a more honest way of putting that would be, people now see the media as getting worse at explaining news.