Over the past few weeks two of our most foremost media commentators, Anton Harber and Guy Berger, have looked at the calamitous state of the United States newspaper industry (or what is left of it) and asked - is it going to happen in South Africa and what can be done about it?
Like sailors discussing the coming storm at sea their analyses are underpinned by a sense of fear and foreboding. Harber headed a recent lecture on the topic "Journalism: A profession under siege." If there is reason for hope it is only because, thanks to Telkom, the South African press has time to prepare. People in the industry here are right to be nervous, Berger writes, "but our pre-broadband era provides some breathing pace to avoid a similar fate."
As these and other commentators have pointed out the old newspaper model was able, in the US, to finance extensive and sophisticated news gathering organisations. Thus, while American newspapers were privately owned concerns they served a clear public interest. Their demise thus comes at a cost greater than the financial loss to their shareholders.
The problem with both analyses is that they simply transpose American concerns - at what the demise of newspapers will do to journalism in that country - to the very different South African reality. Harber is not wrong to argue that if newspapers die, journalism suffers, but in a sense the worst has already happened to our metropolitan English-language broadsheets.
Over the past fifteen years the general trend has been towards appointing politically inoffensive editors, shedding talented journalists, ‘juniorising' newsrooms, prioritising racial quotas, dropping controversial columnists, and cutting back on real investigative reporting. If New York Times journalists could see the future of their newspaper - and it was The Star of today - I think many would lose the will to live.
The advertising revenues of the Independent group of newspapers were spent not on supporting South African newsgathering but - as Paul Trewhela notes -on sustaining the loss-making Independent of London (Tony O'Reilly's so-called ‘calling card'.) It was this kind of relationship, incidentally, which gave colonialism a bad name.
Yet, despite the general running down of the English papers the Sunday Times and Independent group still made, as Harber notes, "stupendous profits" up until recently. That they could do so, while producing a product of steadily declining quality, was only because there was (and still is) so little competition.
Given how far we have already fallen, it is difficult to see the downside of the internet revolution for our media. In a previous essay I argued that, in developing countries at least, electronic communication provides powerful protections against the age old threat of tyranny (see here).
Newspapers used to be - and no doubt still are - the institutions best able to challenge and expose wrongdoing by the powerful. But they have been vulnerable to political influence and control. One of the means by which the PRI of Mexico exerted influence over the press - during its seven decades of dominance - was through the monopoly it exerted over the supply of newsprint. Controlling the flow of information in the electronic age is - as the Iranian regime has recently discovered - like trying to clutch water.
I suspect too that contrary to the fears of Harber and Berger the challenge of online media will be good for the quality of our press. In a recent essay in the Christian Science Monitor Robert G. Picard, an expert on media economics makes the point that across the Western news industry there is an "extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation." In the internet age such information is of very little real value - given that something similar can be easily found elsewhere for free. In this context journalists "must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences."
If Picard is right then the English-language newspapers in South Africa have been going in precisely the wrong direction for far too long. What the media should fear is not the coming storm, but the late arrival of the rains.
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