Our eyes and ears are attentive to the mainstream media as the most influential platform in the coming elections. But it’s also important that there are also many other smaller players adding to the diversity of coverage.
Some of these enterprises owe their existence to the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), which has spent R73-million on 229 projects in the past five years.
Legislated into existence in 2002, the agency built up its staff and systems, and began dispensing grants two years later. Since then, the organisation (of which I am a board member) has been steadily gaining momentum — even though it is still early days in terms of making large-scale impact.
The agency is a partnership between big media and government to broaden media diversity in South Africa by availing funds and training to start-ups and grassroots media, especially in indigenous languages. About half the cash comes from the state; the remainder from the print and broadcast companies.
At a recent MDDA meeting to mark the impending renewal of contracts with private-sector donors, the agency showcased some of the publications that had benefited from its operations.
One is Chalkline, a Western Cape monthly paper that targets the niche market of teachers, and owned by Willida Peach.
“The bane of any entrepreneur’s existence is cash flow,” she says. “In the world of publishing, this is exacerbated by printing and distribution costs.”
The MDDA had ensured the publication’s survival and given it a leg up towards sustainability.
Two other publications backed by MDDA are Ziwaphi and G magazine.
Mpumi Mtshali (left) is manager-editor of Ziwaphi (meaning “what’s up”), a three-year-old publication carrying developmental news in the Nelspruit area. Now approaching its 50th edition, it was given support to develop and implement its business plan by MDDA.
Genuine magazine is the brainchild of Mbali Dhlomo (picture above, right), who originally self-financed the first ten editions before going bust.
“When I heard about the MDDA, I took a bus to Johannesburg, and went right there. I was the first to apply,” she says.
Capital wasn’t immediately forthcoming, however. Instead, the MDDA insisted on first providing business mentorship.
In 2006, Dhlomo was ready to relaunch, and with a cash injection from MDDA, she now prints 3 000 copies an edition of her lifestyle magazine.
From having started initially as self-taught in planning, design, distribution and marketing, Dhlomo says she now sells these skills to others.
But she cautions that sustainability is not likely to be achieved in three years — “I would wish for us to be re-funded”.
Another person who started a publication, ran out of cash, but was then able to pick up the pieces with MDDA support, is Isaac Dlamini.
His company owns Ishishini Lam, a paper targeting hawkers and spaza shops. Some 50 000 copies of the free 16-pager are printed every month.
At present, the advertising revenue covers only half the operating costs, and Dlamini identifies his difficulty as not having a dedicated sales person to ads.
Sosh Times is another beneficiary. “All we need is advertising from the government,” says the paper’s Thabo Mooke, going on to argue that there is a business, rather than a charity, case for this service.
He puts his finger on the acid-test challenge for the MDDA’s work: “There is no point in funding us if we cannot sustain ourselves.”
Viability is not easy to achieve in the micro-economics of small-scale publishers. Even in the mainstream things are tough, especially nowadays.
Last month, the world newspaper industry body, representing more than 18 000 titles, cancelled its planned annual conference in March. The event has grown exponentially since its inception six decades ago, but this year it faced a stayaway by members who were tied up with their crises at home.
All this means that the MDDA has an uphill struggle to produce enduring results. The alternative, however, is for South Africa to miss out on deepening its media density and diversity.
As important, however, and also at stake in this is the strategy of transforming media ownership by expansion of the sector, as distinct from interventions to dispossess the existing proprietors.
Unlike businesses like banks, which agreed under pressure to adopt industry charters to redistribute share-holdings, the country’s media companies are offering the success of the MDDA as a way to grow new owners alongside them.
Unbundling the mainstream would produce more owners (at least amongst the usual BEE players) — but it would not necessarily expand the industry in the way MDDA seeks to do.
In this sense, the agency is an experiment that has a broader significance than just the projects it supports.
If Peach, Mtshali, Dhlomo and the others succeed, their achievements will resonate much more widely.
Guy, Converse
I hope your MDDA will be driving (or, should I say, advocating) a more socialist agenda. I hope you’ll be standing for the poor & middle class, and I further hope you’ll do all you can, including efforts to encourage your members, to focus on more on bread & butter issues, struggles of working families,and successes of such communities & of course, of their governments, may it be local, provincial or even national; HOWEVER, if you’re (your members) are still coming with a neoliberal, neoconservatism and or capitalist agenda, sorry to say this, you’re no different to existing right-centred maistream media houses who would do anything to increase the bottom line even at the expense of people’s civil liberties…
You shall remain condemned…!!!
Mbeki’s sychomphatic auto biographer Suresh Robertson characterised the local media as neocolonial, and despite his glaring contradictions, he was absolutely CORRECT. The media in this country, especially lately, have been factional, partisan, propagandist and downright stupid. Their obsession is the division and destruction of the very people who sacrificed for them to get the rights that they are abusing. A foreigner reading the local media would be convinced that we living under some dictatorship, and that the ANC was an illegitimate governing party! We need a media that is reflective of the views and vision of the majority. Not a lying and polarizing 4th estate.
@ Siphiwo Qangani
“I hope your MDDA will be driving (or, should I say, advocating) a more socialist agenda. I hope you’ll be standing for the poor & middle class”
Why would the middle class want to see a socialist agenda advocated?
@ pasile
“We need a media that is reflective of the views and vision of the majority. Not a lying and polarizing 4th estate.”
Would you suggest that the South African media has a duty to be patriotic?
Perhaps all SA media (including blogs) should subject to government control and all journalists (including bloggers) should be licensed (with it being a criminal offence to engage in any unlicensed journalistic activity)?
Would you agree?
Pasile, it is not sychomphatic, which is not a word, I think you mean sycophantic.
The country does not live under a dictatorship; many of us just want a better government than what we have had for about nine years. Including the “majority”, as you call it, who are black township people who feel cheated by the current government.
Why should anyone even bother with catering for an ever-widening, ever-diverging niche mini-markets who neither buy nor read their product? Especially if these mini-markets are stridently antagonistic towards the mainstream medium? The publishers of those ever-inclusive aggro mini-markets are going to cop a backlash and a profit-choking boycott from the very hands that are currently feeding them. It’s commercial suicide. It’s also jaw-droppingly stupid.
Richard P.- No I don’t think that the media has a duty to be be patriotic to a government, but rather to its citizenry whilst being rigorous. The media in South Africa always expresses the angsts and prejudices of the privilaged white minority. I would be totally opposed to any regulation of the media. However, we need mechanisms to hold the media accountable and responsible when they rubbish and violate other citizens of the republic. The girl who was widely and sensationally reported to have been impregnated by President Kgalema said “I told you what you wanted to hear”. Has the media paused and reflected on the seriousness of this young woman’s assertion? She knew that the media is in a ill-fated campaign to discredit and vilify the ANC leadership.
Rod, thanks for the spelling correction- I appreciate it.
WOW! This looks really impressive. Just one question, is it possible to subscriribe to these publications in hard copy, or is there a strategy to make these available online.
Media diversity seems to be the distant dream in reality. I mean the smaller publications that are circulating in the community are reflecting “diversity”. Little is being said about who owns these publication. It is a fact that the conglomerates like Caxton and Media 24 are dominating the community print media market. This means that there is monopoly and this creates a barrier for the new kids on the block. Look at Soweto, all Urban News titles are own by Caxton. Do we call that media diversity?
Those who are starting their own alternative media to serve the needs of the readers, often find their publications closed atthe later stage. The MDDA is doing the good work in funding these small publication, but we should not turn the blind eye on the sharks that are eating away small fishes.
Most of the community newspapers are not reflective the voice of the communty as such. They constitutte what I call PR journalism. They have the developmental agenda but it is not the informing and empowering one. It is the one taht seeks to promote the interests of the advertisers.
There is a high level of commercialisation in the community print media sector and this gives conglomerates the lion share in the market. Advertisers are warry in putting the money to these publications thinking that their products won’t sell.
Advertisers are bullying these small publications since they know that pullingthe plug will be cutains down. Editors are always under pressure not to report anything that might offend advertisers. What about the politics of printing? Since Caxton is the major printing house arround Gauteng the smaller publications are likely to be printed later.
“I would be totally opposed to any regulation of the media.”
Good, we agree on that.
“However, we need mechanisms to hold the media accountable and responsible when they rubbish and violate other citizens of the republic.”
If a newspaper is publishing slanderous allegations, then it can be sued for defamation. The laws are already there; they just need to be used.
The UK has the Press Complaints Commission: http://www.pcc.org.uk/
Would that be the sort of mechanism you would want to see in place?
Community newspapers are essentially small commercial enterprises, driven sometimes by people with a liking for journalism but who does not seem to know much about good journalism. These newspapers also are inescapably bound by the borders within which their readers live. Of course these papers can and should play a more important role in presenting viewpoints of national interest, but I think this consideration in buying such a paper is secondary to the needs of citizens who want to read about strictly local events. For “big” issues they read the “big” papers or listen to the SABC.
pasile. The day you (and government officials, and politicians) are happy with the media, is the day -
- we’re going down banana avenue
- the newspapers stop selling
Check the “avid” readership of newspapers who “sell” a happy, praise-the-government line in any of our neighbours to the north.
Deaths-ville, my man! “His excellency, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda opened a new building in downtown Blantyre today . . ” ain’t news, my man!!
THANK HEAVENS for a combative, snoopy, prying, critical, hard-to-please media!
And “A foreigner reading the local media would be convinced that we living under some dictatorship, and that the ANC was an illegitimate governing party!”
Quite the opposite, old chap!
Guy, I agree the MDDA is a brave experiment whose mission to create diversity is essential to SA’s democratic well-being.
But, there are serious problems with the way the MDDA goes about its mission. Speak to any of the publishers mentioned in your blog, outside of the glare of an MDDA function, and you’ll get a far less rosy picture.
The bulk of 1st round funding goes into feasibility studies by ‘experts’ who simply don’t understand media economics or local grassroots economies. In fact, many are academics, while in other cases NGO community radio experts are used to assess small commercial print projects. Then, as a 2nd phase, business mentors are appointed who seldom have any real-world media management or entrepreneurial experience.
Often this is the only support publishers get: useless reports that wasted months of time & energy to compile, and which have absolutely no practical purpose other than earning a consulting fee for charlatans who pose as industry experts.
If, finally, the MDDA deigns to extend direct financial support to publishers it uses a bizarre formula to allocate the funding: wasting money on inappropriate technology & locking publishers into unnecessary recurrent expenditure, including loads of expensive j-training at pet institutions, while ignoring make-or-break factors such as sales, circulation, business systems, and all the other back-office systems necessary to survive in marginal but still fiercely competitive ‘community’ press markets.
And, if you dare criticise or caution, you’re branded a counter-revolutionary.
Justin, frankly I think you are making openended and wild general remarks. I am not sure whether you also refer to such “experts” as yourself when you refer to “experts, who simply do not understand media”; as we have also contracted you. You are one of the experts / mentors in our database who get contracted to assist needy applicants.
Maybe you have a point regarding one or two contracted “expert or mentor”, but such wild general conclusion (from your article) is not fair to all the man and woman who are contributing to media development in our country.
Lastly, not all applications are subjected to the process you describe. Each application is considered according to its own merits. Similarly, the reference to “bizzare formula” / “wasting money on inappropriate technology & locking publishers into unnecessary recurrent expenditure” is unclear to me.
I do not know who called you or anyone “counter revolutionary” for critisizing MDDA, certainly whoever IF ANY was not representing the Agency. Contrary to your comments, we have had so many inputs, ideas including critisisms to our work and these have informed our strategy and plans. Some of these inputs are actually from yourself, Justin.
I invite you to meet with the Agency (I will personally be available to join) and discuss your concerns, share your ideas, so we can all together contribute to the mandate enshrined in the MDDA Act.