7. How the news business has changed

‘Legacy media’ is a term in popular use. It describes the main way news was distributed before the internet: radio, TV and that most endangered species, newspapers. It is also often used as a term of derision, directed at publications that primarily publish on websites, versus social media apps that provide news feeds like Twitter.

The jibe is badly misdirected. It implies that social media can somehow replace news publications, that “citizen journalists” and the collective wisdom of the users of Twitter/X and WhatsApp coupled with YouTube and TikTok influencers (and perhaps a few Substack bloggers) can somehow replace professional news publications.

This is about as intelligible as shoppers at large retail stores claiming that there is no need for banana growers because the stores are providing the bananas.

But publishers across the world are in trouble, with many battling to find a sustainable business model. The shutdown of newspapers is at the centre of this. In the US, 20% of newspapers shut down over a 14-year period. Nearly 300 local or community newspapers shut down in the UK from 2005 to 2024. In South Africa community newspapers are struggling to stay afloat and most of the country’s largest publishing houses have laid off staff, reduced the sizes of their newspapers or moved their main titles online. The problem is that while up till the early 2000s there was a profitable business model for newspapers, most providers of news cannot find a way to make money online that breaks even.

Television came to South Africa in 1976. A handful of shows were broadcast for a few hours a day. Radio was then, and perhaps still is, the main source of news for most people. The 7am news on the main English news station, run by the state broadcaster, would be followed by a short commentary in service of the apartheid government. Middle-class families would typically order one or two daily newspapers, such as The Cape Times and Argus in Cape Town and The Star in Johannesburg. These papers catered to their readers’ tastes: somewhat critical of the Afrikaans-dominated national government, but for some notable exceptions seldom truly challenging the racist status quo. Other papers like the Rand Daily Mail, the Sowetan and the Weekly Mail (now the Mail and Guardian) challenged the apartheid government head-on. The Afrikaans-language media, by contrast, was largely dominated by apartheid-linked media companies and Afrikaans newspapers (with exceptions like the Vrye Weekblad) were useful propaganda tools for the government.

The cost of printing newspapers was largely covered by the cover price. The real money came from company advertisements and the classified section, the predecessor of sites like Facebook Marketplace. If someone was born, married or died, the family would announce it in the widely read classified section of a popular newspaper.

There was a golden age of news, at least in South Africa, in the mid-1990s to early 2000s. Newspapers were doing well. International news TV channels like CNN and BBC became readily accessible. And the internet gradually gave rise to online news sites from all over the world, giving people unprecedented access to news. At first nearly all the major news sites offered some of their content free because of the experimental nature of the internet at the time. Young people especially became more likely to read online than newspapers. We were spoilt for choice; it was possible to get more news, more perspectives from more parts of the world, within hours of events happening, at almost no cost, than ever before in history.

But this is where things began to go wrong for publications. With readers moving online, newspaper sales declined and so did advertising. Online sites sprung up, replacing classified ads. In South Africa this was Gumtree. Also, along came Google’s advertising platform and suddenly it became easy for any website to run adverts. Now publishers had to compete for adverts with websites across the world, even ones that offered cute cat memes or porn.

What we have since seen is a collapse of newsrooms across the planet as most publishers have struggled to find new ways to stay afloat.

But there was to be one more major wound. The rise of Facebook and then Twitter changed reading habits again. Older generations of readers loyally bought their one or two favourites from a small selection of city or national newspapers. This brand loyalty gradually eroded online and then was destroyed by social media. Now the main way many people get their news is via their social media feeds. In other words, Twitter and Facebook algorithms select our news for us. News is now widely distributed by influencers and commentators, often quoting from or paraphrasing content originally produced by news publications.

Many people still do go daily or weekly to their favourite news sites. And some publishers, such as the New York Times, which has made effective use of its global brand recognition, have successful online subscription businesses. But these are exceptions; the publishing industry has hit very hard times.

Recently Google has implemented AI summaries of articles. Now you don’t even have to click the links to go to the original articles. This effectively hijacks traffic from those sites. They lose out on traffic and all the benefits that brings, including advertising revenue. What’s more, the AI summaries are often poor, or even inaccurate.

Enter the chatterers on social media who gloat at the demise of "legacy media". They misunderstand that Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and others are rarely the source of reliable original news reports. These platforms use opaque algorithms to filter and curate news, and AI and their users to offer it in a summarised format and comment on news sourced from publishers.

Competent reporting of news requires reporters, photographers and videographers who collect information and create digestible reports. They are paid by publications, which provide the news production process: mentoring, guidance, transport, equipment, editing and fact-checking, followed by carefully deciding what’s worth publishing, what’s not — as well as what’s worth highlighting by being placed at the top of a website's home page.

There are a plethora of news sources. You might scroll Twitter, catching news headlines in your feed, followed by a myriad of opinions and embellishments, usually by people with no first-hand knowledge of the events being reported. Or you might hear constant pings from your cellphone, with WhatsApp notifying you of the latest update to the current obsession of your neighbourhood group. Or you might swipe left on your Android phone and scroll then click the enticing but exaggerated headlines of stories selected for you by Google Discover. Then there’s YouTube, Facebook, Meta, TikTok – scroll, swipe, watch for 30 seconds, move on, repeat.

But all this news is not created by the social media companies themselves. Actual quality public interest news is nearly all produced by professional news publishing companies.

There are also curation websites that summarise news articles from the publications that do the actual reporting. This sucks advertising and clicks away from original news publishers. A currently fashionable curator, appearing frequently in YouTube product endorsements, is Ground News (which came into existence after GroundUp and is entirely unrelated to us or our website groundup.news). They publish headlines from news sites and assess the left versus right bias of how news events are covered. Besides that we are somewhat sceptical of dedicating an entire website to simplistically dividing news coverage on a continuum of left versus right bias, Ground News also hits its readers for subscriptions, effectively drawing money away from original news publishers.

There is justifiable griping about reductions in quality of reporting and breadth of coverage on news sites. But that is usually because they no longer make enough money to pay for enough journalists. There are various efforts underway to try to support journalism. For example, Australian legislators are trying to introduce a mechanism to tax the large tech companies to pay for journalism. It remains to be seen whether this will have any success.

The net effect of this pressure on the traditional financial model that has supported news reporting is that the right to be informed is at risk as newsroom resources dwindle, and the ill-informed attacks on “legacy media” build to a crescendo on social media.