Moneyweb recently reported that Media24 will be closing the print formats of newspapers such as Beeld and Rapport in October. To be sure, other titles such as the Daily Sun and City Press will suffer the same fate.
It is an open secret that all newspapers’ print copies – here and abroad – are struggling and becoming extinct. Some much faster than others. Die Burger in the Western Cape is still going fairly strong, albeit not growing. But Volksblad and Die Burger in the Eastern Cape have already been converted to digital editions on Netwerk24.
The numbers don’t lie. Rapport only sells roughly 60 000 copies on a Sunday. It used to sell some 330 000 copies at the turn of the century. Beeld sold some 100 000 in 2006 and they are hovering around 20 000 now. The bean counters decided it is time to stop the bleeding and it in my view a wise and inevitable move.
Naspers was one of the companies that Afrikaners started with collective volkskapitaal after the devastation of the Second Anglo-Boer War. Die Burger was launched in 1915 and it was revered. Prime ministers were editors of Afrikaans newspapers before entering into politics. Rightly or wrongly, there was a special bond and trust between Afrikaners and their newspapers in the 20th century that is no longer the case.
After 1994, Naspers (and Media24 as its subsidiary) along with many other such companies such as Sanlam and Santam, were gradually divested of their Afrikaans roots. You can whinge about it and say Naspers has a duty to promote Afrikaans – as many people do – but that won’t change economic and political realities. They will only promote it if it makes financial sense, and it increasingly doesn’t. Besides, Media24 is simply closing one format of Afrikaans content and ineluctably moving it online. They still have much to offer in Afrikaans in terms of magazines, as well as regional and local newspapers, on Netwerk24 – for a fraction of the price of buying a daily newspaper.
The decline of the Afrikaans newspapers started in the late 2000s. I know because I worked at Beeld during that time and freelanced as a sub-editor until 2013 after leaving. Experienced journalists were let go or used as underpaid freelancers in favour of cheaper, younger staff. Any company or product, and especially something as reliant on experience as journalism, will eventually start to suffer the consequences.
Emigration and the digital migration did indeed play a role in causing this regression, but the true cause of this decline is the generally inane, salacious and vacuous content that these newspapers dredge up on a regular basis. Their political reporting is sub-par, their woke reporters are fixated on church scandals and debates, and reporting about car crashes seems to be their stock-in-trade. Their opinion pieces on politics are generally milquetoast drivel – Professors Pieter Labuschagne and Koos Malan being exceptions, but they are not editorial staff. No physical Afrikaans newspaper today caters to the higher LSM groups anymore and you might as well read Huisgenoot.
In the 90s and 2000s veteran political journalist Z.B du Toit almost sold Rapport by himself with his political scoops and opinion pieces. He had high-profile contacts in Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, across the political spectrum in South Africa, and even in Europe and the US. He had profound insight into local and international affairs. Nobody at that paper has that ability today. Instead of digging deeper into stories that are already known and providing more insight, they simply rehash what we already know, dish up partisan but anonymous polling data about elections (for which the press ombud took them to task after Action SA complained) or run a non-descript crime story on their front page. This is interspersed with more crime, gossip and human interest together with scant business news that the Sunday Times’ Business Times already ran the previous week.
Despite all the brouhaha about Afrikaans’ status and physical newspapers closing, the language has performed admirably in a variety of contexts amid tough political and economic realities. It is flourishing in the digital sphere with websites such as Litnet, Maroela Media, Afrikaans.com, Vrye Weekblad, Netwerk24 and scores of blogs offering all manner of content. YouTube has tons of good, diverse Afrikaans content. The book market is gargantuan and apart from English, no other language except Afrikaans has its own fiction content section in bookstores. Despite its diminished status at South Africa’s universities, Afrikaans publishing in accredited journals is still flourishing. There are more Afrikaans movies, series and festivals today than at any time in history. National, regional and local Afrikaans radio stations are still going strong and you can enjoy them on the Internet from anywhere. Above all, millions of people speak it everyday – at school, university, at stores and at work and home.
I will personally not shed even a single tear when these newspapers’ corporate overlords finally pull the plug. I can still enjoy Die Burger’s hard copy and get my news and other content in Afrikaans online. The language is irrefutably robust, despite the demise of two ailing and sclerotic newspapers’ print editions. With so much choice on offer, their fate is really of no consequence. And this also leaves a gap in the market for an enterprising individual or company to exploit.
Dr Brink is a business consultant, entrepreneur and political commentator based in the Cape winelands.
