Asanda Magaqa breaks down the current state of the media in South Africa and believes that we need to make sure the people who own the newsrooms of the future are accountable to the same communities that will need them tomorrow
This week alone, the numbers tell a story South African journalism has grown almost numb to. Solidarity says up to 126 jobs are on the line at Media24, the fourth such restructuring in three years at titles like Huisgenoot, Sarie, News24, and Netwerk24. eNCA has put more than half its 309-strong newsroom, 171 people, into a Section 189 consultation as it moves to a “digital-first” model. The SABC, still drowning in debt and threatened with a Sentech signal switch-off, is bracing for another round of cuts on top of the 600-plus it shed in 2021. And here at home, in the Eastern Cape, staff at The Herald and Daily Dispatch went unpaid in July under new ownership, forced to write an anonymous letter just to be told whether there would be a paper on Monday.
I have sat in enough newsrooms, and been retrenched from enough of them, to know the shape of this grief. But I want to make an argument that will be unpopular with some of my colleagues: the disruption itself is not the enemy. The problem is who owns the disruption, and who is made to pay for it.
For decades, black South African journalists have generated the stories, the audiences, and the trust, while ownership, and therefore the balance sheet decisions that end in Section 189 notices, sat elsewhere. When a foreign shareholder or a distant holding company decides a title is no longer “sustainable”, the first casualties are always the newsroom floor, never the boardroom. eMedia’s disclosures this week make the point starkly: its group CEO earned R19 million last year, including a R10.3 million bonus, while the lowest-paid employee at the company that owns eNCA took home R98 000. That is not an industry in crisis. That is an industry whose crisis has been unevenly distributed by design.
Black ownership of the means of producing news, the mastheads, the transmission infrastructure, the digital rails, is not a slogan. It is a structural answer to a structural problem. When the people who own a platform are drawn from the same communities the platform serves, retrenchment stops being the first lever pulled to protect a shareholder in another country or another industry altogether. It becomes what it should always have been: a last resort, weighed against institutional memory, against the decades a sub-editor has spent knowing a beat, against the simple fact that trust, once broken, does not rebuild on a spreadsheet timeline.
This is not naive romanticism. I built Citizen TV Africa on exactly this premise, that Pan-African, citizen-rooted journalism infrastructure has to be owned by the people telling the stories, not rented from those who are not accountable to the communities being covered. But ownership by itself is not a magic wand, and I will not pretend otherwise. The unpaid July salaries at The Herald and Daily Dispatch happened under black ownership, during a transition period in which the previous owners had remained minority shareholders and continued managing operations while Ubuntu Media Holdings built its own structures. Ubuntu’s Sakhumzi Magele says salaries were settled within an hour of the company taking full ownership on 30 July. That may well be true, and speed matters. But it does not erase the days staff spent unpaid before that, or the toll an “administration challenges” explanation takes on someone who could not pay school fees in the meantime. Ownership without capitalisation, without governance discipline, without transparent communication to the people whose labour built the asset, simply relocates the crisis. It does not solve it.
This is where South African business leadership has a role beyond newsroom politics. Black-owned media cannot be capitalised on goodwill alone; it needs the same patient, developmental capital that built black-owned banks, insurers, and mining houses over the past three decades. That means the MDDA, the IDC, and the National Empowerment Fund treating news infrastructure as a strategic asset, not an afterthought competing against agriculture and manufacturing. It means ICASA using licensing conditions to reward genuine black-owned ownership structures, not just shareholding percentages on paper. And it means private capital recognising that a well-governed black-owned newsroom is cheaper insurance against reputational risk than any communications strategy built after the fact. Ownership without capital is just a name on a share register. Leadership is what turns that register into a functioning institution.
So the argument is not “black ownership, therefore no more retrenchments”. The argument is that ownership must come bundled with the will to protect people first, because that will is far more likely to exist when the owner has skin in the same community that will bury the newspaper if it fails. That is the difference between a Section 189 notice issued by a boardroom accountable to nobody local, and hard, transparent conversations between an owner and a newsroom that both know exactly what collapse would cost the town.
I also want to push back on a second instinct in our industry: the reflexive mourning of disruption itself, as though the old newsroom model was sacred. It was not. Digital-first is not a euphemism for job losses; duplicated workflows, bloated management layers, and platforms built for a broadcast era that ended years ago are real inefficiencies. The Eastern Cape’s own newspapers survived 180 years of technological upheaval before this one. Disruption, managed honestly and with black hands on the levers, can mean more sustainable journalism, not less of it. What we cannot survive is disruption managed by owners who treat the newsroom as the only place where sacrifice is required.
Leadership matters as much as ownership here, and the two are not the same thing. A share certificate does not automatically produce a leader who communicates honestly with staff during a crisis, who builds a reserve fund before a transition rather than after a missed payroll, or who treats institutional memory as an asset rather than a line item to trim. That failure of leadership is not unique to black-owned or newly transitioned companies; it is an industry-wide pathology of treating the people who make the product as the most disposable part of it. What black ownership offers is not immunity from bad leadership. It offers proximity, the chance that the person deciding who gets retrenched actually lives in the same country, answers to the same communities, and has to explain the decision without the distance a multinational shareholder enjoys.
Institutional memory, the sub-editor who remembers 1994, the photographer who knows every ward councillor by first name, is not disposable inventory. It is the asset that makes journalism credible in the first place. Black-owned platforms have every reason to protect it, because losing it costs them their own legitimacy, not someone else’s balance sheet in another country.
The retrenchment wave crashing through Media24, eNCA, the SABC, and our own Eastern Cape titles is real, and it is frightening for the families behind every number. But the answer is not to romanticise the newsrooms of the past. It is to make sure the people who own the newsrooms of the future are accountable to the same communities that will need them tomorrow.
Asanda Magaqa is an award-winning broadcast journalist and media entrepreneur, and Founder and Executive Director of Citizen TV Africa.