As in a sibling relationship, Natascha Jacobsz is extremely protective of her continent and its people. She describes herself as a typical white South African child, who’ll deal with anyone who dares to chastize Africa.
The 32-year-old started her career at CNBC Africa in 2008 and says she was a wet-behind-the-ears business features producer, with no business news experience. She’d previously worked in current affairs and general news.
Even though Jacobsz studied law at the University of Pretoria, the journalism bug bit her when she joined the local campus radio station, Tuks FM, as a newsreader.
In 2005, Jacobsz joined CNBC Africa and worked as a business news producer for seven years.
In 2015, Jacobsz relocated to the Netherlands with her family and joined the Dutch media NGO, RNW Media as a project manager for This is Africa, a website dedicated to providing an alternative, non-Western narrative of Africa.
“I am innately curious with a passion for Africa, people and story-telling. In the words of [former South African President] Thabo Mbeki – I am an African. It’s who I am at my core and it plays a huge part in my sense of identity, especially since relocating to Europe,” she says.
Although she admits business news is a tough but extremely gratifying industry to work in, her career has given her first-hand experience of the untapped potential of people in Africa.
“We have some of the most innovative men, women and youngsters on the planet. However, when it comes to economics, I’m hesitant to blanket Africa as a whole. Unlike the European Union (EU), our sense of ‘oneness’, at least on an economic level, is a lot more complicated,” she says.
Living in Europe has made her aware that financial challenges, especially those at a macro- economic level, are the same everywhere.
“Economic growth has all but stalled across many developed nations and, according to reports such as the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) recent World Economic Outlook, which highlights projected GDP growth levels above 5% in more than 10 countries, one can’t help but get excited about Africa as a whole,” Jacobsz says.
It hasn’t been all work and no play for the travel enthusiast. One of her fondest memories includes a Mt. Kilimanjaro expedition with CNBC Africa Vice Chairman, Rakesh Wahi, who led it in 2013.
“It was an incredible bonding experience and a great lesson in humility,” she says.
Jacobsz foresees Africa’s full potential being unlocked, along with the hope that every African woman will be able to pursue any dream without restriction, be it personal or professional..
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– Thandi Xaba

Tasch

A Sibling Of Africa

Trust Matsilele says writing for FORBES AFRICA changed his life. The most remarkable and harrowing story of the lot is his own.
His crisp declamatory picturesque articles, told with conviction over the last two years, were born of years of struggle, pain and disappointment from birth.
At just eight months old, his mother abandoned Matsilele and his twin brother at the door of Harare Central Police Station in Zimbabwe with nothing but a tiny bag of clothing. Luckily, within 24 hours, they were adopted by their aunt, who had just moved back to Zimbabwe, after years studying in the United States.
“My aunt had no kids, but all of a sudden, she had this heavy burden to carry,” says Matsilele.
The twins moved to their new home, a mission school in Mwenezi, a small district in southern Zimbabwe, with their new parent. They lived a middle-class life and almost forgot they had been abandoned. In 1992, their guardian moved to South Africa to work. The twins moved in with their grandmother in the village. This meant goodbye to bread and butter for lunch at school.
“My grandmother tried to make sure we had good lunchboxes when we went away for sports at school but on a day-to-day basis we struggled to carry lunch to school. We walked 10 kilometers barefoot to school and herded cattle after school,” he says.
It was a struggle until their aunt started making a bit of money in South Africa. In 1996, she sent the boys to boarding school where Matsilele traveled in a bus for the first time.
“I was in the drama club and we went in a bus to Masvingo and I was so happy. School was OK but I couldn’t afford somethings like freezit (sweet ice) so I washed clothes for kids from urban areas, who came from better backgrounds, to make money. It was hard. I could see my poverty clearly. I remember my brother and I at some point wishing we went to a poorer high school, with kids like us, but my aunt had done the best she could so we were grateful.”
Matsilele left high school to set foot in his capital, Harare, a bustling city, for the first time. It was a painful reminder of a place where his mother abandoned him, but also a chance to study journalism; paid for by his brother.
Here, 19-year-old Matsilele saw a traffic light for the first time.
“As much as I was aware of their existence, I had never seen them. It was all shocking for me. My brother struggled to pay my fees so I had to work during the day and take classes at night. It was hard to make ends meet. Even money for a taxi to work was hard to get. I remember one of my classmates religiously brought a pie for me. Sometimes even if I was struggling to go to school, I would remember the pie I would get and I would make my way there.”
Hard work, on a pie a day, earned Matsilele a diploma in journalism. He moved to South Africa thinking it would be easy to get a job. It wasn’t.  South Africa has a 25.5% unemployment rate and with 2.2 million immigrants looking for work.
No job, no money, no food and no roof, Matsilele hit rock bottom in a country he thought was paved with gold; to find home was a dumpsite. He lived there for four months picking up scrap metal and bricks to sell.
“We used some rags and plastics to cover ourselves if it was raining or cold. Police came to harass us at any time of the day. I remember it rained one night and my passport was in my pocket and it got defaced,” he says.
Life on the harsh streets of South Africa was dangerous, so Matsilele moved to a squatter camp to live with his cousin.
“We would walk for about two hours to look for jobs on the streets. Any jobs, like cutting lawns or general work. I did that for two years just to have a bit of money.”
Matsilele’s nephew, who worked for The Zimbabwean newspaper, based in Johannesburg, showed him a glimmer of hope and invited him to his office to talk about a job.
“When I got there he had gone for a conference and the people at the office refused me entry. I think I was too scruffy or dirty and looked like a street kid,” he says.
A week later, he went back and the nephew employed him.
“To get meaningful money for someone staying in a squatter camp, about R1,000 ($70) a month, was hard but I was writing about 40 articles a month at R40 (less than $3) a story.”
This resilience marked his entry to the world of journalism.
“I moved to a small place with a friend of mine and together we bought our first bed. This was a huge adjustment coming out of a squatter camp. We had never owned a bed,” he says.
Another friend offered to help pay for Matsilele’s honours degree in journalism, at the University of the Witwatersrand, to better his chances in life.
His honours supervisor recruited him for a job at CNBC Africa, the sister company to FORBES AFRICA, as an online journalist. Here, he met Chris Bishop, Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, and he says this changed his life.
“Bishop is one of the best people I have ever met. He has stayed a bit in Zimbabwe so when he heard I was Zimbabwean, we immediately connected… I asked if I could write for FORBES AFRICA and he said ‘yes’… I couldn’t believe it. A man like me who was abandoned by his mother and stayed on the streets being allowed to write for such a publication? Who would have ever thought? It was even beyond my wildest dreams.”
Working here opened doors for Matsilele, one of them— speaking at a conference at the University of Southern California in the United States in 2015.
Three years later, Matsilele walks upright, looks people in the eye and debates with conviction. He says working for this publication has helped him shake off his terrible feeling of being a nobody in a rural village who became a street kid in a foreign land.
Just over a decade after he slept under the stars in the rubbish tip, Matsilele is now studying classics in Vancouver, Canada, for the next three years.
A few months after leaving South Africa, Matsilele has been invited to give talks about his work for FORBES AFRICA.
“My presentations are based on my work at FORBES AFRICA and with Chris Bishop. It was like learning journalism from scratch even though I had written more than 300 stories. If there is anything FORBES AFRICA should be grateful for its having changed the life of a journalist,” he says.
Matsilele is living proof that hard work in Africa, sprinkled with a bit of FORBES AFRICA, can change your life.

‘It Was Beyond  My Wildest Dreams’

I wrote an article for a business news website several months ago about South Africa’s need to develop industrialists. The need is simply unavoidable: we incessantly hear about the country’s high unemployment rate in the media. Much is stated yet little is done.
A reader commented on the article, making a rather brash statement, which he is entitled to. He was of the opinion that I was naive for stating that we need to produce A-grade industrialists, instead highlighting the fact that our government should rather focus on mitigating the capital outflows South Africa has experienced in recent times. Perhaps our stringent labor laws are to blame or maybe our sluggish economy has precipitated these outflows. I agree in part; ultimately my point, and the real issue, is that not enough great ideas are being cultivated. There are various reasons such as entrepreneurs continuing to find it difficult to access funding, and our high skills deficiency relative to other industrialized economies.
The tenuous relationship between the private and public sectors cannot be over-emphasized. This issue is constantly debated in the media, illustrated by differing ideologies that the public and private sectors have pertaining to the economy: what should be done and how it should be done. Unfortunately for the greater masses, and more importantly the economic welfare of our country, their issues remain unresolved. The situation with our capitulating mining industry is a perfect illustration of the tipping point that has been reached as far as relations between the state and business are concerned. It comes as no surprise that the sector has cut thousands of jobs and this trend is likely to continue in other sectors.
According to recent data from the Department of Trade and Industry, South Africa’s gross domestic fixed investment to GDP hovers around 20%, well below the fastest growing nations. We can no longer justify our lack of saving as a nation on the fact that we have a growing fiscal budget, placing greater pressure on our budget deficit. There are several countries that face similar challenges, and are considered developing countries by the World Bank, that have significantly higher national savings as a proportion of the national income. The Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea – owe some of the successes of their economic revolutions to substantially higher national savings, which enabled them in part to finance the industrialization of their economies through private investment rather than relying on foreign investment.
This brings me to my next point: South Africa needs to create world-class industrialists now and at a rapid pace. The ‘industrialist’ term has been misused by being prefixed by ‘black’ in recent government economic policy documents. The term has been used to describe what appears to be Black Economic Empowerment benefactors who will be moulded into billionaires. The ruling African National Progress (ANC) party has stated several times its need to create black billionaires. Few would disagree that the emergence of wealthy blacks, including all previously disadvantaged race groups, is necessary in the transformation struggle. The issue is not as much whether the emergence of black billionaires is wrong, but rather the manner in which the government plans to go about it.
The prioritization of creating employment opportunities remains pivotal in curbing the dependency of South Africans on state welfare and ultimately building a society in which the economic benefits of the country benefit everyone. For now, the prospect of higher employment amid the slowing economic growth is inconceivable. Great ideas need to be cultivated. Ultimately it was great ideas that birthed many of the largest corporations the world has ever seen and immortalized industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt that transformed the concept of entrepreneurship.
The alternative of creating an elitist ‘black’ faction of billionaires through state procurement processes, better known as tenderpreneurship, will not only breed discontentment among the poor black majority, but will be a clear sign that the ANC has never, at its core, been a truly leftist party but is mutating  into a right-wing movement.

More Entrepreneurs, Less Tenderpreneurs

I have not worked a day in my life, because I love what I do. The daily adrenalin rush of live television is a necessity and I thrive on the pressure. Recently, CNBC Africa went global with an exclusive interview with President Jacob Zuma. To prove my mettle as a financial journalist, I asked a number of tough questions. The more challenging aspect was that CNBC Europe had booked a satellite link the following morning, directly into their live shows. We would cross ‘live’ six times during the morning into the global CNBC network and introduce segments of the president’s interview live from Parliament in Cape Town, South Africa.
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Each of the first five live crossings to London was a nerve-wracking two-minute ad lib leading into the interview. It was as though this is what I had been training for the last 13 years. Five crossings down, and congratulatory emails started streaming in from our global network affiliates, the most notable from CNBC Europe’s Head of News and Programming, Patrick Allen: “Watching from New York, very happy with the outcome, interview good, report great, you and shot look great, bravo.” But in the live television business, it is not over until it is over.
Our biggest moment was still to come – our live link directly into Squawk US. The controllers out of the US spoke to me: “Bronwyn, this is New Jersey, we are linking you into Squawk US. This is CNBC US, the biggest financial broadcaster in the world, they have a very different broadcast style, no mistakes tolerated. You must conduct a precise 45-second ad lib, then throw forward to a 15-second sound bite from President Zuma.”
My heart was pounding and my knees shaking, as
I waited for the cue from Becky Quick, the CNBC US anchor. Then it happened.
“Thank you Becky – emerging markets are out of favor and their currencies are all under pressure. South Africa has one of the most volatile currencies in the emerging market space having fallen some 17% against the dollar over 2013. Many economists in South Africa feel ongoing allegations of corruption against the ruling party and unrest in the mining sector are fueling further rand weakness. In a CNBC Africa exclusive, I sat down with South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma and asked him what he thought was behind the rand’s fall.”
And just as suddenly as it began, it was over. South Africa’s minute of fame on the world’s biggest financial network had come and gone. How did it go? The broad smile on my producer’s face and her thumbs-up indicated it was a clean execution. My reputation intact, I was ready to face another day in the world of live broadcasting.

‘I Have Not Worked  A Day In My Life’

As my car comes to a halt at a red traffic light, the newspaper vendor approaches, waving the latest broadsheet.
“Take one,” he pleads. And when I decline: “How about some change so I can eat tonight.”
Thabo Dube has been selling newspapers on one of Cape Town’s main traffic intersections for more than a decade. But in the past couple of years, he has fallen on hard times.
“I used to be able to make a living from this job, but now I also have to beg to make ends meet,” sighs the lanky father of three, as cars speed past.
As a newspaper salesman, the 43-year-old doesn’t earn a fixed salary. Instead, he buys a stack of newspapers at a reduced vendor price each dawn and takes home whatever profit he makes from sales that day. If he can’t sell the whole stack, he barely cuts even. Some days, he makes a loss. Dube is feeling what many international media experts have been preaching over the past few years—print is becoming an endangered species. The future of news is digital. Instead of buying a daily newspaper or taking out a subscription, more and more people read news on the internet, tablets or their mobile phones.
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It all began in the United States and Europe where the growth of the internet and mobile media access has already sparked the demise of the news industry as we know it. Traditional print media are struggling to make profits. Countless newspapers and magazines have had to lay off staff. Some publications have gone out of circulation. Although African print media have not yet experienced the same slowdown, they are on a straight path towards digital media consumption, experts say.
“The way people consume media in Africa will change dramatically,” predicts Justin Arenstein, manager of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC), an internationally-funded initiative that sponsors digital media projects on the continent and consultant to the world’s top search engine provider, Google, as well as the Knight Foundation, a US-based foundation that supports innovative journalism.
What is a fact in the States and Europe is becoming equally true for Africa. Today’s consumers don’t go to a single place for their news. They prefer to access information in ways most convenient to them: by scanning through different sources of content digitally, reading bits and pieces from various publications instead of reading one newspaper indiscriminately from front to back. Readers don’t want editors and journalists to tell them what’s pertinent any longer; they would rather search for specific sites and content that is relevant to their lives, depending on what topics or geographic areas interest them most. That’s especially true for the tech-savvy, digitally literate young generation that demands content to be audio-visual rather than printed black on white.
Print publications in Africa have started to feel the pinch.
“Newspaper and magazine sales are dropping. Publishing houses need to understand why and come up with alternative solutions to maintain a healthy revenue stream,” suggests Dawn Rowlands, CEO for sub-Saharan Africa at digital communications group Aegis Media. There is only one solution to prevent losses, she says: “Print needs to evolve to content provision.”
That means getting content to people should take priority, while the platform used to reach readers is secondary.
That’s easier said than done. The convergence from print to digital has been, and still is, a difficult road for most print media houses. Although newspaper owners realize they have to expand their business model to include digital media, they are not too sure how to make it work and how to monetize it. There is also a great reluctance to change, despite the fact that profits are tumbling. Most publications’ attempts to keep up with the digital revolution have been half-hearted, defensive and often even arrogant.
“It’s a head-in-the-sand approach. Although many African newspapers have developed an online presence it has financially not been that successful,” says Rowlands.
The focus remains on print, with online editions being the poor, low-quality cousins.
In the long run, ignoring the digital trend will not pay off, Rowlands warns. Although people may continue buying a newspaper on a weekend for a leisure read, she is convinced that print media as we know them will vanish within the next decade. The lesson for many print media houses will therefore be a tough one: those that don’t adapt will die.
“Eventually we will see the death of traditional print media in Africa, maybe in the next 10 years,” predicts Rowlands.
Only media houses that reconsider how they approach consumers and that reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms, such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices, will have a chance of survival. Learning from the progressive downfall of print media in the States and Europe is a good way to stay ahead of new developments, experts suggest. No need to reinvent the wheel.
“If African media take heed of what’s happening up north, of what hasn’t worked and where the pitfalls are, they have a good opportunity to build something great,” says Arenstein.
Unsurprisingly, owners of print media hold a more moderate view. Print is far from being dead, insists the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Contrary to conventional knowledge, newspapers remain a large and thriving industry worldwide, despite the rise of digital media: between 2005 and 2010, daily newspaper circulation in Africa rose a whopping 30%, according to WAN-IFRA statistics.
Another study on “The Future of Print Media”, conducted by US publication Capstone Report, states that the “death of print” remains a limited phenomenon in Africa… for now. In 2011, print circulation in many markets on the continent was stable or slightly up, in part because of rising literacy levels. Literacy—which increased by more than 12% in the past decade among African adults—usually leads to a boost in disposable income and this creates potential new newspaper audiences.
But despite relatively upbeat current data, experts warn the respite won’t last long. Even though African news markets have not fully matured yet, they will be faced with similar challenges to the States and Europe in the next 10 to 20 years, cautions the Capstone Report. Already, African audiences are moving online at a remarkably high speed. The common challenge for print media hence becomes trying to keep up.
The good news is that the predicted death of print does not equal the death of journalism or quality content. People will always want to read good content. What will change is where and how they want to read it. In Africa, mobile news delivery—and not website-based delivery like in the States and Europe—appears to be the medium of choice.
“Consumers in Africa leapfrog. They don’t follow the same path as Europe and the United States,” agrees Rowlands.
She believes the next few years will show huge change on the continent as prices of internet connectivity and technology come down, with smartphone penetration on a rapid increase. This means that people all over the continent have more access to digital news and social networking tools.
Platforms like smartphones and tablets are the future of publishing in Africa because they allow people to look beyond national borders and access the content they want, when they want.
“The appetite for online content is growing because people like to go online to find alternative content that they can’t necessarily buy at their local newsstand,” says Susan Hansford, business development manager at South African publisher Primedia Online.
“People love technology. It’s going to move really quickly. Some experts predict smartphone prices will drop to $20 within the next five years,” says Rowlands. In countries like Kenya or Nigeria, China-produced replicas of Apple iPhones are on sale for a mere $40—nearly half the price of an original iPhone.
Although $40 is a lot of money for an ordinary person living in Africa—in Kenya, for example, the average monthly income is about $60—increasing numbers of people save up for a mobile phone with advanced functionality, especially as prices for 3G and data bundles drop.
“Comparatively speaking, smartphones are not that expensive anymore. For someone living in a rural area, for instance, using a smartphone is often a more affordable and effective way to communicate with the outside world than the money and time it would cost to use public transport [to meet someone in person]. The argument that technology and connectivity are too expensive is a red herring,” says Arenstein.
In some parts of the continent, the digital revolution has already started. Kenya and Nigeria are fast becoming hotspots for digital media uptake and development. In both countries, mobile phones are increasingly used as the primary transactional device for news gathering, communication and banking. Mobiles are also used for other data sharing, like news and information about election monitoring, disease outbreaks, stock exchange fluctuations or weather forecasts for farmers.
Being at the forefront of the digital age has not happened by chance. Both the Kenyan and Nigerian governments have invested in digital development as part of their economic growth strategy by opening up competition in their telecoms and data sectors. This has forced mobile providers to lower the cost of their services, thus ensuring that larger parts of the population can access them. Both governments have also pumped resources into IT skills development so that their own population can develop new platforms, instead of having to hire foreign skills or relying on innovation buy-in from the developed world.
Private businesses in both countries have become keenly aware of the need to invest in digital content. Kenyan media houses, for example, formed a national digital journalism task force earlier this year aimed at developing a nationwide data-driven digital news model that will help the country’s media industry stay up to speed with new technologies.
The impact of what is happening in Kenya and Nigeria reaches beyond their borders. Kenya, for instance, is building a regional hub of technology and media innovation with its east African neighbors Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Nigeria is doing the same in West Africa, to a lesser degree, by cooperating with Ghana.
“Change is coming, and we must be prepared for it. Technology always wins, no matter how much you fight it. So instead of resisting it, the print media must devise a way of embracing it. When television came, we all thought it would sound the death knell of the radio, since it is capable of capturing sound and picture. But television has not displaced the radio. Instead the two have been complementary,” says Nigerian Broadcast Production Services CEO, Tolu Ajayi, at a recent panel discussion about the future of the country’s print media.
At a slightly slower pace, Egypt, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania are developing into digital hubs. Angola, Mozambique and Zambia also experience massive digital growth, even if those countries are still at the infant stages of digitization.
“They are big markets that navigate away from print, even though their media mix is currently less focused on smartphones,” says Rowlands.
For now, people here consume news mainly via mid-range mobile phones, such as WAP-enabled phones with internet access or handsets with radio access. They also increasingly use text-messaging services to access news and information.
“From Zimbabwe in the south to Senegal in the north, using mobile for content exchange, for business or private use, is starting to have a massive impact on people’s lives,” says Arenstein.
Only countries with poor IT infrastructure, like those situated in central Africa that remain without direct access to undersea cables, such as Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo, continue to lag behind.
Surprisingly, Africa’s most developed nation, South Africa, is not at the forefront of media digitization with most of the country’s newspapers lacking investment in new technology.
“I don’t see the same degree of creativity in South Africa [than in Kenya or Nigeria],” says Arenstein, who consults media houses all over the continent. “South Africa needs to catch a wake-up call. It is lulled into dismissive complacency, believing that their [well-established] print media market is too big to fail. Yet [being a developed economy], South Africa almost falls victim to the same market conditions as the US and Europe.”
Arenstein is convinced that Africa’s most southern nation is at a tipping point at which it needs to make a massive switch to mobile media—and it needs to do it fast if it doesn’t want to miss the bus. “Convergence is definitely happening, with or without South Africa,” he warns.
Latest statistics prove Arenstein right—sales of some of the country’s daily newspapers decreased by up to 17% in the past year, according to the South African Audit Bureau of Circulations. This is just the beginning, the bureau warns, as the newspaper industry will further lose to digital products in the next few years.
“We are seeing print publishers either struggle with circulation or circulation is flat,” says Hansford.
But not all is doom and gloom in the South African news market. There is one paper, which has not only kept up with the times but been at the forefront of convergence. The weekly Mail &amp; Guardian (M&amp;G) was the continent’s first news website when it launched its online edition 19 years ago. Today, the M&amp;G is Africa’s first newspaper available on Kindle, apart from the fact that it can also be downloaded onto a rage of other mobile platforms—a tenth of the M&amp;G’s subscriptions are currently for Kindle and iPad users.
“Our strategy is ‘digital first’,” says M&amp;G online editor Chris Roper.
When the M&amp;G launched a new version of its website a few months ago, Roper said its readers increasingly demanded and made use of its multimedia elements, partly because bandwidth constraints are being eased.
“We didn’t do it as a response to slowing circulation figures [of the print publication], but because we believe in innovation, in getting content to people. It’s the news that’s important. The platform is less important. We provide whatever the content demands,” he says.
Multimedia has become a vital component in the creation of news. And so have social media.
“Journalism is becoming more inclusive. The audience also contributes. Today’s readers want much more than simply being presented with content. They want to engage intelligently with the publication, be able to comment, contribute and influence the choice of content,” says Roper.
On the M&amp;G website, readers can comment on articles, are invited to contribute content to a news story or join conversations and debates with journalists on Twitter. As its next move, the paper plans to run an ‘open newsroom’ by making its weekly news diary available online so that readers can make suggestions for what stories should be pursued. The M&amp;G is one of the few South African newspapers whose print circulation numbers have increased.
For many print media owners, one of the biggest stumbling blocks of the digital revolution has been their struggle to come up with new ways to make a profit. Traditionally, print publications make most of their money from advertising—much less from subscriptions and individual sales. But the advertising-driven model is becoming outdated fast as more readers consume digital content. And a new, equally profitable way of attracting advertisement revenue still has to emerge. Initiatives to put up paywalls to protect content have only shown moderate success.
In the meantime, advertisers go where the money is: they are quickly moving from print to online. It’s a vicious cycle. As more readers consume content online, print circulations decrease, followed by losses in ad spending and a slump in profits.
There is an upside, though. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and beginning to offset some of the decline in print. The internet is an attractive medium for advertisers because it allows them to match ads more carefully to different audiences and measure accurately how well their money is spent. Websites can track the exact number of people who have visited the site, clicked on an ad and bought the product. Internet advertising is also seductive because online ad rates are far cheaper.
That’s another reason traditional media are losing out. The ad revenue loss experienced by print is nowhere near making up for the ad revenue gain made by online.
“At no time in the foreseeable future will digital advertising revenues replace those lost to print, making the search for new business models, including paid-for online access for news, a key goal for many newspapers,” says Riess.
Print owners will have to figure out many aspects of their business in a media world where only one thing is certain right now. No matter how long they manage to hold on to their old ways of doing business, sooner or later, they will have to say goodbye to print and hello to digitization.

Tag: News

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

A Sibling Of Africa

‘It Was Beyond My Wildest Dreams’

More Entrepreneurs, Less Tenderpreneurs

‘I Have Not Worked A Day In My Life’

From Newsstand To The Palm Of Your Hand