[By Sipho Hlongwane]

It’s a bit of a daft argument for a largely online journalist to make, you might say. Why would I fly my flag under a banner which we are supposed to treat with scorn and derision, akin to the helium dirigibles of yore?

Such is the hubris of online. All that talk of disrupting old models and distribution channels has gone to our collective heads. The divide-and-conquer trick that the world of online pulled on the music and film industry is abundantly evident, and we’re now supposedly waiting for it to pull the noose on newspapers as well.

Also, it is worth noting that the online “everything is free” model isn’t working out as spectacularly as many had hoped it would. Web advertising doesn’t work the same way that it does in print (where anyone who knows how to Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V can help themselves to your content while completely circumventing your deal with your advertiser).

Publications that tried to provide excellent content for free while relying on the strangely popular ad-bombing model soon discovered that this doesn’t work. Slate.com recently laid off its venerated media critic Jack Schafer — an admission of defeat, if there ever was one. Coupled with online users’ aversion to being sold — remember that truism, “if you aren’t paying for it, then you are the product” — then free, online content is in some danger of collapsing on itself.

Soon we’ll find that the news worth knowing will be behind a paywall of some sort.

Even that darling of online content, the Huffington Post — the content cannibal and blogging slave trader that it is — was sold in the most bizarre deal the world has ever seen (this one trumps Chelsea Football Club buying the perfectly useless Fernando Torres for £50 millon) to AOL. A media outfit that makes money by farming content and exploiting its labourers sold to a doddering old man of online that hasn’t had a good idea in a decade? Yeah, that totally vindicated the sell-your-readers attitude of online news business models.

Even so, print makes even less sense than the likes of the Huffington Post these days. And print is in its last lap. That’s largely true for the West.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, print circulation fell by 25% in the UK between 2007 and 2009, and by 30% in the US over the same period. Things didn’t look so good in Greece (20%), Italy (18%) and Canada (17%) either.

But then, this is Africa.

We’re bucking the trend. Newspaper circulation is growing, and the number of newspapers is growing, too.

Ghana is one such country, where according to a report by the African Media Development Initiative of the BBC World Service Trust, more than 50% of newspapers in circulation there came to be in the last few years.

Nigeria has seen growth in the number of daily newspapers, while big weeklies have declined in number somewhat. There is no reliable circulation data (according to the BBC World Service Trust), but the trend in the number of publications between 2000 and 2005 was up.

One Nigerian title which has enjoyed explosive growth in the last 10 years is the Daily Sun. The broadsheet was incorporated in 2001, and as of 2011 claimed to have a daily circulation of 130 000 copies and 135 000 for weekend titles, with an average of 80% sales. This makes it Nigeria’s best-selling newspaper. The paper targets an upwardly mobile, urban population, and despite its distinctly tabloid flavour, it’s probably Nigeria’s equivalent to our Sunday Times and The Times.

Kenya is another country on the continent that has good news for print newspapers.

SA, too, has its success story: the Daily Sun tabloid. It has a circulation of about 1,5m and is read by about 3,8m people, making it the country’s most widely-read newspaper. In 2004, a mere two years after it was founded, the Daily Sun became the most widely read newspaper.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves in believing that the pernicious disruptiveness of online won’t reach us. It will. But several critical factors will hold it back.

Most South Africans have a mobile phone. But it’s not a Blackberry, an iPhone or a clever-looking Samsung. Statistics show that the most ubiquitous cellphones in the country are entry-level Nokia and Samsung devices. I need not tell you that the browsing experience on such devices is poor.

Due to SA’s poor Internet penetration (growing though it is), the common window into the Internet will be the feature phone for the foreseeable future. Will prices of smartphones and tablets fall rapidly enough for them to become of common usage, the critical factor upon which the explosion of online news will hinge? Possibly. But not fast enough to kill off print’s upward trend.

Let’s not even mention the cost of cellular network usage, or the barriers to entry in setting up new networks.

We often forget the real growth in SA’s print market lies in the lower LSMs and vernacular language titles. The Daily Sun proved there was money to be made in printing news for the poor and somewhat poor. And other news houses are catching on. The Sunday Times recently launched a Zulu version of its paper in KwaZulu-Natal, which it plans to bring to Gauteng at some point. News24 has a Zulu edition — and, no, this doesn’t disprove my point in the least. It shows that publishers are gaining an appetite for vernacular newspaper publishing. I have full confidence that this market will grow rapidly in the next few years.

There is space in the SA print market for many more mass-circulation tabloids in African languages, and perhaps even broadsheets aimed at the middle class. I just don’t see online beating newspapers to those eyes within the next 10 years.