Media Freedom Festival asks if the future of South African media includes content creators
Content creators who are passionate about the state of affairs are capturing their audiences on social media.
As part of its third and final Media Freedom Festival session, Media Monitoring Africa hosted a dialogue on October 16 at Joburg Theatre.
Content creator, Dan Corder, was the keynote speaker outlining his vision for the future of media and media freedom, and touched on themes of public broadcasting, combating disinformation, and promoting public-interest journalism.
This included reflecting on the role of information integrity in strengthening democracy, as well as the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, algorithms, biases, and the balance between engagement and fact-checking.
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Corder, who often reflects and shares his views on South Africa’s state of affairs on TikTok, emphasised the need for the media to evolve with technology in the way of telling South African stories.
“We need to talk about an ecosystem that ultimately helps each other, because more people are finding out what’s happening in South Africa through the way I’m telling the news, but I cannot understand South Africa nor talk about South Africa as coherent without the iconic and incredible journalists whose work we benefit from. One part of my vision for the future of South Africa is that content creators have to be hired by newsrooms.”
The content creator noted that in the current digital age we are in, South Africans appreciated his online content because they were chronically online.
“But ultimately, we would appreciate being in newsrooms and learn what journalists have learned in telling the same stories the best way possible. This would also direct the traffic of viewers online to the newsroom rather than a creator’s social media channel, and create more funding, advertising and revenue opportunities value in that media house.”
Academic and activist Na’eem Jeenah agreed with Corder on content creators collaborating with journalists, but warned that some people lacked accessibility to the content online.
“In saying that, we must be aware that we live in a country with extreme poverty where data is an extremely valuable commodity.
The young people who would be the ones to use social media and consume content are likely to be excluded because the unemployment rate in that age group is close to 60%, and hence they rely on SABC channels and journalists for credible news and information.”
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Executive Director of the Press Council of South Africa, Phatiswa Magopeni, was in support of content creators joining newsrooms.
“If content creators were in newsrooms, the verification and fact-checking would be done by journalists, and creators would simply be there to amplify the stories. They would be there to do things the newsroom doesn’t have the capacity to do.”
Magopeni reflected that there was once a time when newsrooms didn’t have graphic designers, but that has changed. Sometimes, courtrooms don’t allow cameras in court, but sketchers are allowed to sketch for visuals.
“We have, over time, introduced new skills in the newsroom. Why are we offended at the idea of working with content creators?”
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