Business unusual

It’s one communication that journalists don’t want to get: a retrenchment notice. But that’s happening increasingly across newspapers and magazines, and it’s revitalising a sense of organisation among professionals.

There’s also a new mobilisation among that sector of people who produce programming for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. In their case, they’ve been antagonised by not receiving payments they’re owed.

These developments complement a wider picture of South African workers on the march. In turn, that’s linked to the Zuma ascendancy in the ANC and the resurgence of the labour movement. These days, barely a TV news bulletin goes by without a Cosatu person being quoted.

Worker militancy is in the air. Within the SABC itself, the Broadcast, Electronic, Media and Allied Workers’ Union (Bemawu) has become highly vociferous in condemning the broadcaster’s board and senior management.

Vividly, the crisis at the SABC has stimulated six different groups to take to the streets under the banner of the ‘Television Industry Emergency Coalition”.

A poster by some of their members wittily declared: ‘The revolution will not be televised — no budget”. Actually, the protests have put the public in the picture about the crisis in public broadcasting.

Another grouping of media workers — the Professional Journalists’ Association — is not yet staging demonstrations, but it is successfully signing up new members via Facebook. Its momentum has grown to the extent that the body is now engaging the Freelancers’ Association (SAFREA) over mutual relations.

There is also the Save Our SABC coalition, which has harnessed various media NGOs and others to make public waves over this period.

In total, the media space has become a site of sizzling activism.

For several years, the SA National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) has been the only public player that directly represented people employed in the media. In contrast, bodies like the Media Workers’ Association of SA and the Southern African Journalists’ Association languished.

Now, it’s a new era, and the recent affirmations by people making a living from the media are reinvigorating the realm of mass communications.
The question, however, is whether this energy will lead to enduring alliances and capacity for action, and whether it will also move beyond immediate self-interest to reflect the wider public interest.

That outcome will be important if government gets involved in the SABC as a result of the looming implosion there. It will need the efforts of direct stakeholder groups to ensure that political influence doesn’t come along with state intervention.

The sustainability of the recently-minted media militants will also affect whether they can get government out of SABC affairs once there’s some stability — and whether they can also help to keep a new board accountable to the public.

But on top of this, how the newly-galvanised media activists deal with the stresses on the industry is a key variable.

The diverse component associations will be hard pressed to save jobs. Even at the SABC, sooner or later a business-minded CEO might well decide to reduce the labour force or amount of programming outsourced to independent producers.

Given the crises in the media industry at large, the groupings may find themselves having to go along with a range of cuts, perhaps even agreeing to jettison jobs or independent production quotas in order to save the whole.

There’s an irony here. On the one hand, within the growth of the information society, there’s also rising relevance in communications skills.

On the other hand, as media technology falls in price and non-media players can produce mass communications, so it seems trickier to operate a business model around professional content production.

Hitherto, media economics have hinged mainly on content (including news) being the primary means to connect advertisers with audiences (for a fee).

That arrangement has spared the public having to carry the full costs of the media they consume.
These fundamentals are changing as the information and communications environment becomes ever more populated, thanks in particular to the growth of the internet. Audiences and advertisers can — and will — increasingly interrelate directly and thus without need for content as an intermediary.

A new formula is yet to emerge to replace that which is passing. And as the internet (whether on computer or cellphone) moves further on to centre stage, the people who produce content will also need to be playing across text, audio and visuals — as well as on air, online and in print.

No one knows what model (if any) will pay the salaries in all this, but it’s a potential starting point to have media people standing up to be counted.
For the people now getting organised, the future will not be a return to business as usual — even though many of them may want that. The media industry is facing a change that’s more fundamental than the recession or mismanagement at the public broadcaster.

So, the new movement needs to look beyond the crisis of current retrenchments and missed payments, and engage with the future of the media itself.

And not only for the sake of its own members, but also for that of the public at large.