JOHANNESBURG, Gauteng — The South African media crisis is accelerating as severe newsroom retrenchments and unpaid salaries threaten the financial sustainability of the country’s most established journalism institutions. With hundreds of jobs on the line across multiple major networks and publishers, industry experts are raising alarms about the long-term impact on democratic accountability and public information.
The financial strain is evident across the sector’s biggest players. Currently, 171 eNCA employees are potentially facing retrenchment, a development that has also renewed scrutiny over SACTWU’s nearly three-decade relationship with HCI. Observers note the inherent tension between the organization’s dual roles as a trade union and a major investor. Simultaneously, Media24 announced the restructuring of more than 100 newsroom positions, with an additional 19 business news editorial jobs under threat. Compounding the distress, staff at The Herald and Daily Dispatch were recently left without their July salaries, sparking severe concerns regarding the financial viability of legacy news organizations.
Slindile Khanyile, Deputy Chairperson of the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF), emphasized that these cuts represent more than just economic losses; they highlight an industry-wide, two-decade struggle to find a sustainable business model. With the country less than three months away from its seventh local government elections, Khanyile warned that shrinking newsrooms will disproportionately harm coverage outside major economic metros.
“Local government is the most important layer of government because that is where service provision happens,” Khanyile noted, adding that without adequate newsroom resources, the vital stories of broader, non-metro society will go untold.
William Bird, Director at Moxii Africa (formerly Media Monitoring Africa), echoed these democratic concerns, pointing out the stark irony of the current digital landscape. While audiences are flooded with abundant but increasingly unreliable and AI-generated content on social media, newsrooms are simultaneously cutting back the very credible journalists needed to verify facts and provide context. Bird argued that by stripping away journalistic resources, media houses are “killing off their single most valuable asset, which is their credibility,” ultimately driving audiences away and undermining public trust.
A significant driver of this instability is the digital advertising disparity highlighted in a 2025 Competition Commission report. The inquiry revealed how heavily South African media companies are disadvantaged, with tech giants like Meta and Google absorbing the vast majority of digital ad revenue. To illustrate the severity of the imbalance, industry leaders pointed to a recent disclosure by the Daily Maverick CEO, who noted that despite generating millions of views, the publication earned a mere 60,000 Rands in a single month from YouTube.
Both spokespersons agreed that the traditional third-party digital funding model is broken. Khanyile stressed the urgent need to implement the Competition Commission’s recommendations, tackle the complexities of big tech ownership, and forge new collaborative models between legacy brands and smaller independent or community publishers to break down industry silos. Bird added that finding alternative funding mechanisms—including requiring dominant social media platforms to help finance the news they distribute—is critical for commercial media survival.
When asked if the industry should expect continued retrenchments in the coming months and years, Bird offered a nuanced “yes and no.” While legacy models continue to fail, he noted that alternative frameworks are already emerging. Ultimately, he stressed, a functioning democracy absolutely requires a strong public service broadcaster and a robust, independent media sector to survive the ongoing financial bloodbath.
