Media experts have challenged media houses to be innovative in developing new revenue models of making money, especially in the age of technology where people prefer to consume content for free and are unwilling to pay for it.
Presenting on the Challenges and Opportunities for Media and Journalism in the Disruptive Digital Era at the ongoing regional media conference on AI and its future in journalism on Wednesday in Bulawayo, South African based Senior Consultant in media, journalism and business strategies, Dr Francis Mdlongwa, said that while digital-first or digital-only media has emerged more significantly, thriving business models of these are lacking.
“The business model of these digital media operations and of the legacy media generally is still under greater scrutiny as more media houses fold and retrench more journalists,” Dr Mdlongwa said.
Dr Mdlongwa said the advertising-supported business model no longer works because advertisers pay much less in vast online and digital spaces because space there is unlimited versus the limited space or time of legacy media.
“Key question that emerges is: if these digital-first media operations cannot sustain journalism, what should be done?” asked the media expert.
“New business models that seek to monetise audiences have emerged such as paywalls, both hard and soft or freemium; monetisation of ‘native advertising’; of blogs; of newsletters; podcasts; clicks among others.”
The three-day regional media conference began on October 3 in Windhoek, Namibia, then moved to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – hosted by CITE – on October 4, and will conclude in Lilongwe, Malawi on October 5.
The conference’s theme is “Empowering African AI” to advance the Future of Journalism Education in Southern Africa
According to Dr Mdlongwa, in this context, new media and audience relationships, as well as new metrics to quantify audience media consumption and engagement, are required to drive content.
“For example, Google is collaborating with specific media firms in South Africa like the Daily Maverick, Kenya, and Nigeria to launch what is called Rich Communication Services (RCS), which exploit the power and convenience of smart mobile phones as discussed at the WAN Digital Conference on , 13 September 2023),” said the senior media consultant.
“In their beta versions, news stories are being run as conversational modules, and not as properly formatted stories that we have been familiar with, according to Google officials who made presentations at the WAN conference.”
Dr Mdlongwa said from the news organisation, a story is transmitted to a trusted news agent and then on to a news consumer or subscriber via a smartphone and the consumer has to pay for the news content using a variety of methods, mostly likely a credit card.
“ A news consumer will engage with the newsagent on what story she or he wants from a selection of news events that would have been covered on a specific day and also ask for specific details of the story known at the time – all of this presented as in a modular form and as a conversation, according to Google officials,” he said.
Dr Mdlongwa said it was a mistake for mainstream news media institutions and their journalists to hold back after the arrival of the internet.
“This arrival was followed by the launch of online search companies Yahoo and then Google in the 1980s and, later digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter marked the ushering in of the economics of information abundance in creating, distributing, and consuming of news and information.
“As when the internet arrived, mainstream news media institutions and their journalists held back from using these platforms and, in most cases, continued to operate as if it was business as usual. But it wasn’t, as we all know today,” Dr Mdlongwa said.
“But what has been the cost of the failure of the news media to embrace these new technologies?”
As a result of that ‘relaxation or hesitation,’ Dr Mdlongwa said tens of thousands of media jobs were lost globally.
“Examples include 1 611 jobs lost in the United States in 1990, and 1 387 in 2009 (Franklin, 2014:482). In 2008 alone 16 000 jobs were lost in the US,” he said.
“In the United Kingdom more than 5 000 media jobs disappeared in the decade up to 2014 (Harding, 2015:6).”
Dr Mdlongwa said statistics of job losses in the media in Africa are patchy, but in South Africa alone 5 000 media jobs were lost in the past decade while half the total number of editorial jobs in South African newsrooms (Daniels, 2018:8).
“This increased deprofessionalisation as anyone could claim and do journalism work and professionalisation of journalism and there was greater scrutiny of journalistic work by ordinary people, the Fifth Estate (Witschge and Nygren, 2009),” he said.
“There was increased ‘news noise’, disinformation, misinformation and fake news largely from social media (Harding, 2015), which result in the decline of the value, utility, truthfulness and relevance of journalism. Simultaneously in the so-called ‘post-truth world’, we have had the rise of social influencers, especially in the marketing of goods and services.”
Dr Mdlongwa said the Covid-19 health pandemic which struck globally in 2020, forced companies to close en masse across the world, accelerating the financial and economic crisis of journalism and of newspapers in particular.
“Silverman (2020) describes Covid-19 as a ‘‘media extinction event’’ and Karter (2022) sees the emergence of ‘‘news deserts’’ in many parts of the world,” said the media expert.
