This edition of State of the Newsroom looks back at 2019 – the year that was – and offers some initial reflections on 2020, a year that, as Franz Krüger puts it in the preface, “was impossible to ignore”. We have called this issue “Before/After” to try and capture the sense of co-habiting two spaces at once. The report includes a detailed analysis of the status quo of media ownership up until the end of 2019, and a roundtable discussion of the roles and pressures faced by women media workers in the newsroom.
It then looks at the immediate impact of the pandemic on the survival of newsrooms, including the Mail & Guardian and the SABC, and, through expert commentaries, the different status of women journalists working in South Africa during the pandemic compared to colleagues in the rest of the region.
A summary account of Press Council complaints adjudicated in 2019 is offered by the new press ombud Pippa Green, who finds that many of the complaints before the council are evidence of “the effects of the cutbacks” in the struggling media industry.
The report also has updated media indicators on newspaper circulation, broadcast statistics, and on media freedoms, developed from a review of South African Editors’ Forum media releases from 2019. A new summary account of transformation in newspaper editorship, and on the boards of major media houses, also suggests that although racial transformation in the newsroom is strong, there is some way to go to offer gender parity in the decision-making affecting our news.