INDIE INFO PROVIDERS: News creators are on the up as legacy media falls out of favour

With as many as one in four South Africans getting their news from individuals rather than organisations, a report looks at these people to understand how they fit into a changing media landscape.

News media in South Africa are staring down the barrel of an existential threat, and the bullet has already been fired. Many legacy brands that we know and still, despite everything, trust, will almost certainly disappear in the next few years.

This won’t be news (sic) to you, but people who care about being informed, and who realise how fundamental a functioning free press is to the survival of open societies like ours, will be wondering, what comes next?

What comes next is already here. As of September 2024, about one in four people in South Africa get news from individuals rather than organisations. A recent report from the US-based Center for News, Technology and Innovation (CNTI), in collaboration with Code for Africa (CfA), looks at these individuals, variously termed “news creators” and/or “indie info providers” (and more on those terms later).

The report is entitled “South Africa indie info providers: responding to resource constraints with creativity and collaboration” and has some interesting insights gleaned from a survey of 43 “content producers”, and in-depth interviews with 18 of those.

The aim of the report? To understand the backgrounds of news creators, their motivations, relationships with their audiences, revenue streams and strategies, and their sense of their role in the broader news information landscape.

Unsurprisingly, many news creators are building direct-to-audience brands that augment their freelance profiles, and seven of the 11 interviewees who had journalism backgrounds began their indie brands as freelancers.

They were largely seeking to build their profiles, motivated by the decline in journalism opportunities in South Africa. The whole issue of whether news creators qualify as journalists, or even want to be known as journalists, is revealing. While the term “journalist” resonated with many interviewees, some felt the term was too limited. They see “creatorsˮ as distinct from journalists.

One of the interviewees articulates the problem of authority.

“I’m a new media creator who talks about the news and delivers news to people, so in a very simple way, I am a journalist. But I do it through wide-ranging media reading and consumption of information. I do lots of online data research… I’m definitely doing journalism, but in South Africa, with our investigative journalists and our frontline beat journalists, it feels odd t