This edition of the FM is a special one. Apart from being the new design, it has a new combined team, reuniting many stalwarts who deserted to establish Currency with at least some of their old colleagues. It’s like a homecoming.
It’s an oddity in a way, because as you have probably heard ad nauseam, the print media is in terminal decline. I have contradictory feelings about this — I think the media is far from “declining”; it’s absolutely rampant. The problem is not necessarily the quality of the media — there is still plenty of great journalism out there — but the quantity. So much so that journalism has twisted on its axis: its value in the modern age has moved steadily away from transmitting information and towards distinguishing signal from noise.
Think about it this way: are you more informed today than you were in 1990? I can tell you absolutely without doubt that you are not only more informed, you are gargantuanly more informed. In 1990, the only way you could read The New York Times as a South African was if you were in New York — not literally, but you know what I mean. I now regularly scan at least five international publications every morning and often read The Wall Street Journal in depth.
The numbers illustrate the trend. When I was editor of Business Day a decade ago, its daily print circulation was about 22,000. That was well below the roughly 37,000 copies it circulated in the mid-1990s but considerably more than today: in the first quarter of 2026 its total audited circulation was roughly 14,000. Ergo, newspapers are dying, and it is the end of the world for the media. Right?
Except I still remember the month Business Day’s digital audience first passed 1-million unique browsers. In August 2016, the month of the crucial local government elections, it recorded 1.48-million of them. That was a monthly measure, and a unique browser is not quite the same thing as a unique human being. Still, the order of magnitude is extraordinary. The print product was being distributed in tens of thousands; the website was reaching browsers counted in the millions.
The comparison is imperfect. Print circulation counts copies, not readers, while digital metrics count browsers, visits and loaded pages rather than attentive human beings. But the broad conclusion is unavoidable: the audience for Business Day’s journalism did not disappear when its print circulation declined. It migrated, multiplied and became much harder to monetise.
People talk about the enormous impact of social media, which is obviously true — its “circulation” numbers are embarrassing for the traditional media. Individuals now have more heft than august publications did. But the real loser has not been the written press but television news and, to a lesser extent, radio news.
The problem for print has not been viewership or even impact; it still largely defines the news agenda. The business plan just fell to pieces, and it remains parlous, especially for magazines. Because online advertising is so cheap and plentiful, those grand full-page advertisements in the Sunday Times that sold for half a bar each have largely disappeared.
At the same time newsrooms have shrunk and many of the talented journalists I worked with are now in the communications departments of financial institutions and the government.
But something else should be acknowledged: the process of being a journalist has become much more efficient. I still remember tramping to the cutting library in the basement of Business Day trying to find some fact that I vaguely remembered. It would take a chunk of the day. Today it’s all available in overwhelming amounts and instantly.
IMHO the overall quality of stories in the media today is fabulously better than it was in 1990: there are more facts per article, more sources quoted, more points of view cited — at least in the reputable titles — than ever. And there is more “reporting”, in the sense of transmitting information, by ordinary people — far more — than there ever has been, and that has made a big difference.
Doomsayers will point out, somewhat accurately, that social media provides the opportunity for lots more slop, lots more advocacy, lots of ear-splitting voices. Of course that’s true. The effect of social media on newsgathering has been pernicious; it has tended to undermine the credibility of journalism, and trust in the media has declined because a shrill, biased, attention-seeking voice is still a voice, and it can have an audience in the hundreds of thousands. But on the other side of the scale, it’s helped with the speed and circulation of information, and its corrective power is enormous. Overall, I don’t think it’s as bad as the doomsayers claim.
The finances of the media remain challenging, but there have been winners, notably the big international publications and some of the upstart internet-savvy media. It’s been a heady and exciting time, if not particularly lucrative. It hasn’t stopped and it won’t stop. How the media deals with AI is going to be the defining moment for the next generation.
George Orwell once said: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In a sense, this is a sharper riff on the opinion of the great proponent of “liberty”, US founding father Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
I would put it slightly differently: in the modern era, journalism is the business of informing people how their reality has declined to conform to their preferred narrative. I hope and trust we will continue to do that in the new FM, as we have for the past 67 years.