Naspers chairman Koos Bekker said the decline and death of newspapers in print form is inevitable and marks the inexorable advance of technology.
Writing on Sunday in City Press – a Naspers-owned title whose print edition is earmarked for closure – Bekker said that over centuries, the media journalists and publishers have used to disseminate information has changed dramatically.
“Within a few years, no economy the size of South Africa’s will have any daily newspaper being sold on the street,” he predicted.
Naspers-owned Media24 is reportedly planning to scrap the print editions of several well-known titles, including City Press, Daily Sun, Rapport and Beeld, putting the jobs of media professionals on the line.
Bekker said that in the same way that clay tablets made way for papyrus rolls millennia ago, so the move from newsprint to online consumption is inevitable and cannot be stopped.
Almost the entire newsgathering process has become electronic, with printed newspapers becoming something of an anachronism.
“Over time, almost the entire process has become electronic, except for the very final act, when a huge machine of steel still smears the output in ink on flattened tree trunks,” Bekker wrote.
“Today, however, media groups worldwide are reaching an inflection point where that final step is also becoming electronic. The reader receives the final news output on a laptop or cellphone – not because the company wants to, but because the reader prefers it.”
Rapid decline
He pointed to the rapid decline in the circulations of newspapers in South Africa in recent years, including those owned by Media24.
“At its peak, City Press sold 350 000 copies every Sunday. That has now tumbled to 11 718 (barely 4%),” he wrote.
The Daily Sun tabloid, which once had 500 000 buyers a day, now sells less than 12 000 copies. In the 1980s, the Afrikaans Sunday title Rapport boasted a circulation above 400 000, which has now fallen to about 36 000. Beeld has fallen from a peak of 116 000 to just 10 000 copies daily, he said.
“Such paltry paper sales mean that printing presses now run only briefly at night but still require a full crew; delivery trucks drive around half-empty, burning diesel; many a café or supermarket will no longer reserve display space for a newspaper if only five copies sell each day. Currently, an annual loss of R12-million is forecast for City Press, with R18 million coming next year.”
Many readers have already migrated online, Bekker said, and the rise in the readership of online publications bears this out.
However, according to Bekker: “Our future competition will not come from local media groups, but rather from the global King Kongs: X, Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. And lurking in the near future, AI is an opportunity, but also a hideous demon, which may yet devour us alive. To survive, our journalists will have to work intimately with engineers.” — © 2024 NewsCentral Media
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