Editorial: Readers will decide news quality
This is the first year in South African democracy that you cannot buy the City Press during your Sunday stroll to the local cafe. The paper, an ever-present in that history, printed its last newspaper last month — along with Beeld, Daily Sun and Rapport — and is now only available digitally.
It’s easy to take it as a portent of the perilous road ahead for the already beleaguered print industry.
Sympathy has been strangely lacking. A common reaction has been to deride any mourning as a futile stand against progress; the reader has spoken and we should not cling to that which is dying.
Yes, the media landscape has changed drastically over the past 10 years and will invariably alter in unimaginable ways over the next decade. But to greet the demise of a print product with ambivalence is to forget what made it great.
It was not the paper on which it was printed. There is nothing inherently magical about a newspaper. Socially, sure, the beautiful thing about a physical copy is that it can be shared, passed around and collectively leafed through. But that’s not what makes it great.
A great news magazine or newspaper represents an undying commitment to truth and integrity. It is the considered curation of an editorial team that understands it must offer irreproachable journalism to justify its price on the shelves and position as the fourth estate.
There are notable publications that have taken those same values to an online audience and continue to produce valuable work. The problem is that the industry is besieged by a set of standards that often encourage the dumbing down of its work. To make an impossibly long story short: social media, search engines and shorter attention spans have produced a system in which success is too often measured by clicks or other banal metrics.
For all the chest-beating we do for a digital future — or present — there has to be a recognition that only a tiny percentage of news brands have escaped that rat race. Fewer still are thriving financially while giving their journalists adequate time to produce informative, effective, thought-provoking work.
This year feels like a watershed one for global media. It’s either we figure out how to sustainably take old-school values and principles into our new reality. Or we surrender to oligarchical ownership — a fate that has the disconsolate Washington Post staff banging the warning drum.
The good news is that the war is not ours to fight alone. Your voice, as a reader, is as important as any other. The type of content you decide to consume, and support, will be invaluable in shaping what is considered profitable to produce in the future.
Without you there is no newspaper — online or otherwise.