TODANI NODOBA | Print media's digital migration a blow to poor, literacy

The month of September always marks the beginning of life. September is a month of rebirth and nature is always celebrated on all fronts after long cold winter nights.

Also, in SA, September is tourism month during which one can visit certain tourist destinations at highly discounted rates. The year 2024 however, presented a different scenario during this month, particularly in the newspaper industry. 

This is the month in which we are saying goodbye to some of our iconic print newspapers and magazines.

Earlier this year, Media 24 announced its consideration for the closure of some of its print newspapers, including the Daily Sun, City Press, Rapport, Beeld and Soccer Laduma.

The consideration ultimately materialised as the five publications will be migrating to digital platforms. The last day of these print publications is September 30. 

The migration from print to digital has implications for the SA community, a community where the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen. A major blow for the majority of grassroots communities where Wi-Fi and data are luxuries may mark the end of reading newspapers and by extension relying on particular sectors of media due to lack of choice. Obviously, grassroots communities are the most affected.  

While it is a fact that some of those newspapers served the elite, as in the white minority of SA, the majority of the black community will bear the brunt.

From the five titles, only two served Afrikaans speaking communities and the other three titles served primarily the black community. Media24 acknowledged that the migration from print to digital may result in 400 job losses while the other 400 positions may be transferred to sister companies, another blow for the SA employment sector with the youth being the most severely affected.

The reasons for the migration range from losses in revenue in the print sector since the Covid-19 pandemic to the offloading of the print publications portfolio to enhance a “fully digital” future in the current era of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Many black communities will continue to suffer in view of this business decision.

Print publications including newspapers have played a pivotal role in the literacy of the black community. Illiteracy has mostly affected the adult community.

The fact sheet for the department of higher education and training of 2022 shows the adult literacy level at 10 with about 3.9-million adults considered illiterate in SA.

The black community is the most affected in this regard. The Daily Sun, which captured an audience between the ages of 35 and 60, mostly appealed to a semi-literate readership.

BusinessTech shows that most newspapers declined from before Covid-19 to 2024 and the Daily Sun declined from 274,165 copies sold in 2014 to 11,046 in 2024. This is a huge loss for the business.

However, the business sector’s main purpose is to build digital platforms to compete with other print newspapers and magazines to maximise profit.

It’s still possible to retain the print publications while building digital publishing at the same time but the attraction of the elite is key. Balancing the two seems to be a daunting task for the industry but the irony is that semi-illiterate communities will experience an information gap.

This generation together with the illiterates will largely remain dependent on radio, another critical medium. However, many black people from the 1970s to the new millennium will attest to the fact that newspapers strongly improved not only technical reading skills but also promoted a reading culture.

Newspapers like the Daily Sun will therefore shift to a different readership, one that can afford data and Wi-Fi and is able to navigate the digital spaces.

Though the grassroots community is the largest, its position in society is compromised when decisions are made premised on the elite.

As some will say, the economically privileged are the ones who make society’s decisions.

For now, we can only lament the death of the once vibrant and lucrative industry of print publications while adjusting ourselves to embrace the digital spaces of these publications.

• Nodoba is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Venda. She writes in her personal capacity