The Harbinger


Take your head out the sand, Peter Bruce

September 18th, 2009

Business Day editor Peter Bruce had a go in his column on Monday at the head of First National Bank for suggesting to his staff that they should stop their newspaper subscriptions - costing over R1-m a year - and read it all online. Bruce was being - I am afraid - struthious.

Bruce said someone had to pay for the journalism they found online - the best of which still comes from newspapers - and suggested that the bank should care more about the future journalism, and the harm that will befall us if it disappears.

Nobody loves newspaper more than I do, but there are a couple of hard realities Bruce needs to face up to:

- Newspapers will not be saved by expecting banks to subsidise them
- If newspapers are to survive, they have to show they bring a value that is worth paying for, above what one can get online for free or near-free

Bruce is correct to worry about journalism. Matthew Buckland responded to him by saying that journalism was flourishing on the internet, but I cannot easily agree with him. It is true that the Web brings us an exciting new form of participative, interactive journalism, and it is true that it promises a much more democratic, open form of journalism, but most of its news still comes from traditional newsrooms and without these we will not have too much in-depth, investigative reporting. Until we have a better financial model for internet journalism, we need to worry. I am certain we will eventually find this model, but in the meantime newsrooms are shrinking and there is less and less substantial journalism of the kind that made newspapers so central a part of community, city and national life.

And we are not going to get there by asking banks to subsidise us in the meantime.

I am concerned that newspapers like Bruce’s are in a self-defeating downward cycle. They are cutting their newsrooms to survive, and have less and less hard journalism in them, at a time when they most need to prove to the world that they offer real value and are worth paying for.

I do not mean to target Bruce here. His paper is better than most, and he has fought a sterling battle to minimise editorial cutbacks. He stands heads and shoulders above some of the editors in town who have not hesitated to slash and burn to the point where their newsrooms are barely newsrooms, and their newspapers more and more like mushy entertainment and lifestyle magazines.

But newspapers will only survive if we show they offer enough value to merit the extra cost. And that is harder and harder in a world where the internet multiplies one’s choices, and costs so little to produce and distribute, and newspaper newsrooms are shrinking every year.

Smart, non-struthious editors are experimenting with ways to make online journalism work and changing their newspapers to ensure they survive the change in readership patterns and needs. Smart owners would be investing more in this. Newspapers - like all media before them which faced new technological challenges - will survive, but only if they adapt quickly to a different world.

It is noteworthy that Business Day does not have a significant web presence. That is something Bruce can fix - with a greater chance of success than trying to get bank managers sentimental about newspapers.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print

3 Comments Add your own

  • 1. Bernard  |  October 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    Good Point Harbinger!

  • 2. Alex Kayle  |  October 5th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Well said. I completely agree that newspapers will now have to adapt quickly to a different world - especially a world that has become more technologically savvy and immediate.

  • 3. Cedric Mboyisa  |  November 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    It would appear all roads lead to the Internet. New media is the future, which is not so distant! What is critical is coming up with an appropriate financial model, and this has to happen as a matter of urgency.

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Anton Harber: Media

Anton Harber

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa's Investigative JournalismTroublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.


What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)

Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy - Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004).

Journalism in the Age of the Market
- Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, Centre for Civil Society, University of KZN, Aug 2002

The Untimely Death of SA’s Finest Daily - Sunday Times, May 2005

“Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence” from Go Home or Die Here, edited by Shireen Hassim Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby (WUP, 2008)

Remarks at Goedgedacht Forum, October 2008

The rise of social network journalism - From The 2009 Flux Trend Review (Macmillan, 2008)

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