Journalists who have ‘stopped looking’
funding, pursued with some success by The Guardian, are the other alternative funding sources. Both models are being pioneered in South Africa by amabhungane and the Daily Maverick. In the past two years, amabhungane exited a contract to supply stories to the M&G and closed the resulting gap in their budget with a wave of crowdfunding that supplemented their flow of institutional donor funding. But Sole said this mix is not a long-term solution for the industry.
“The Gupta leaks were very good for us [amabhungane],” said Sole, “but the dividend didn’t last very long. And the model works for us, but only because we’re small, we’re elite, we do things which are publicly sexy.
“But the journalism ecosystem that is necessary to sustain democracy is much, much broader than that — and that has to be paid for. So our model is not enough to support that breadth. My own view is that there has to be political and legislative intervention somehow to tax the platforms that are taking all the money and funnel that into journalism.”
There are some precedents for equitable taxpayer support of newspapers. In Norway, for example, all newspapers receive state funding. The idea is to subsidise a broad range of ideological voices, thus enriching the national conversation. One of the most successful Norwegian titles is the nominally communist paper Klassekampen (Class Struggle).
But the South African state can’t afford to fund newspapers. (It did fund The New Age, but that didn’t work out.)
Journalists themselves cannot evade their own role in the money problem. Many readers and donors want to support exceptional reporting. And we should not be lulled into complacency by the excellence of our investigative units in covering and resisting state capture, a project that was justifiably prioritised by the major news platforms at the expense of other urgent stories.
There is a dearth of deep coverage about the slow-motion crises in South Africa — inequality, land and food security, environmental degradation, corporate extraction from consumers, the state’s failures in delivering quality healthcare, safety and education.
That failure of breadth and depth can be linked to our immersion in social media platforms, which have simultaneously supercharged the news economy and debased it. Our work routines are now a chaotic scatter of reflexes, desperately seeking a disposable topicality.
Freelance journalist Niren Tolsi described this syndrome with brutal honesty in his Ruth First lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand this year. “Journalists have stopped looking,” said Tolsi. “We have stopped looking up from our smartphones and social media platforms when we report on something. In doing this we miss the detail which elevates our storytelling. We do this because we are told our readers demand constant information. We also do it for the endorphin rush of virility, for the narcissistic kicks of affirmation from our digital networks. With our heads down, we have physically stopped looking at the world around us, its stories and its nuances.
“Like the society around them, journalists have developed an inwardlooking narcissism, which is contrary to our essential role: to tell other people’s stories. The journalistic eye has been replaced by the self-aggrandising ‘I’ as opinion replaces more expensive social and forensic investigation in an age of relentless newsroom corporatisation and austerity.”
To recover that attentive journalistic eye, we need the guts to tackle an array of elites, and not just politicians — advertisers, the rich, the educated, the thought police of ‘woke’ Twitter. It’s far too easy and tempting to please the denizens of our personal echo chambers, to speak to and for people like ourselves.
All too often, press reportage ignores or alienates a range of audiences we imagine are not reading us, or don’t read at all, or would never understand us. These include older people, religious people, traditionalists and people whose populist politics we despise — to the right and to the left of our comfortable, centreleft consensus. Many of these people angrily use the phrase “mainstream media” to describe the press.
That is a nebulous and loaded phrase, often irritatingly used by conspiracy theorists to wave away factual realities. But it is not an imaginary construct: there is indeed a set of perspectives, convictions and reflexes that dominates journalism, but this is not universally held. The trust deficit between readers and the media doesn’t come from nowhere, however cynically it is being deepened by divisive political forces.
To stay uncaptured, we need to capture a bigger reality. And to fight harder, we need to listen harder.
This article is dedicated to the memory of three great journalists: Mandy Rossouw, Suna Venter and Sibonelo Radebe