PETER BRUCE: It’s hard times for newspapers — business should help out

The boxer Mike Tyson once said of an opponent that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. This is true.

After I became editor of Business Day in January 2001 I developed plans for a third section of the newspaper. Then, on the morning of September 11 that year, fanatics flew airliners into the World Trade Centre in New York.

That day every corporate advert in the “flat plan” marking the advertising positions on the pages was abruptly cancelled. They never really came back again.

Within weeks my board met amid a violent reversal in advertising forecasts. I was told to cut 40 of my 120 staff. Distraught, I contemplated rebellion. I called the late Ken Owen, Business Day’s founding editor, and asked him what to do. “Slaughter them,” he advised, “and when you’re done, go upstairs and tell the board.”

It wasn’t the first time I had to cut journalists, and I was punch-drunk by the time I lost the editorship 14 years later. Today there are just a fraction of that original number. Experienced editors, who actually make newspapers or websites as opposed to merely reporting for them, can be counted on one hand.

Two things are at play here. The first has been, until now, the general strategic inability, or reluctance, of management to turn its face to the future. Since I joined the company as editor of the Financial Mail in 1997 the shape of its revenues has hardly changed at all, despite the breathtaking technological revolution in the media. We remain vastly over-dependent on advertising. We assume that the rise of digital media simply means we should replace print advertising with digital advertising.

No declarations of intent to the contrary by the string of CEOs that have come and gone in my time have made the slightest dent in this addiction. The current owners arrived in 2019, a few months before being punched in the mouth by Covid and even by then, still, no-one was asking: “how will my decision today make it easier to live without advertising, print or digital?” They walked into a ticking time-bomb.

The media’s become a little like running Transnet. You’re a success if you report a profit on paper, but no-one counts the trains you scrapped to get there. One affects the economy; the other our democracy. CEOs came and went and none left the company better off. All complained about the mess they inherited. Most left far richer.

In the meantime the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and others around the world have successfully transitioned their revenues from print (and digital) advertising to digital (and print) subscriptions, obviously retaining what advertising they can. None of it happened overnight. None of it has happened at all in SA.

Even at Business Day, where we first felt the horror of what was coming when the JSE marched into the building one day to tell me they were dropping the requirement that listed companies publish interim and full-year results in a national newspaper. We have done little to respond. It is not the job of journalists to sell advertising or subscriptions. The JSE’s current listings slide must be karma.

The other thing at play is that the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) have simply run off with online advertising markets all over the world. That’s why you get to use them for free. There is not much newspaper managements can do about this, and efforts elsewhere to limit the effects through action by government have got nowhere. Advertising agencies generally leave their digital advertising buying decisions to youngsters who only ever read Instagram or TikTok.

But to start a digital arm of any newspaper now, or any professional digital content business, and hope to finance it through digital advertising is to repeat the same strategic and tragic mistake of print. The old advertising model, digital or print, is basically dead. The only possible replacement is subscriptions, and getting there costs money. And jobs — all of the big titles that have successfully transitioned made journalists redundant in the process. Still, I feel for my managers. They have to pay salaries and bills on the dot with traditional revenue while finding future money elsewhere.

Daily Maverick, highly regarded, also paddles like mad below the water to keep afloat via private and institutional donations, fired up by its marketing message that it stands between democracy and chaos. Last week Maverick’s weekly newspaper, with virtually no advertising, was almost as big as the corresponding Sunday Times, funded purely by advertising. News24 is spared the expense of printing and distributing newspapers and has an owner with impossibly deep pockets. The Mail & Guardian comes closest to a balance, but it is also externally funded. Newspapers in the Independent group are ruined.

No media house here has a guaranteed future. But while we may all have our favourites, the fact is our democracy is healthier for them all. An SA without the Sunday Times, Business Day, Maverick or News24 is, for me, unthinkable. But unless businesses understand how journalism is funded and how much it costs, every title here is imperilled.

No local news media are now covering the Rugby World Cup in France with people on the ground. Fifteen years ago I paid to send Business Day reporters to cover an ANC summit out of my own pocket.

I hope businesses have time, now and then, to think about journalism in SA, and that when one of our hard-working management colleagues finally knocks on the door to sell a whole company a subscription, someone in charge finally opens it.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.