Newspapers for sale on the streets of Blantyre
Well before I left for Ghana in June, I was tired of all the talk of all the talk of the death of newspapers in Canada. As a young journalist, I was disheartened to be working in an environment where so many of my colleagues were consumed with predicting the death of our profession.
It was a great relief to come to Ghana and find a press that was not dying. Far from it, in fact. As discussed in a previous post, the press in Ghana is a thriving, robust beast, closely followed by Ghanaians of every social class. Every morning, the newspaper stands are crammed with dozens of newspapers—tabloids and broadsheets, in both English and Twi, the local language, and often sold out by mid-afternoon.
I thought I might find the same when I went to Malawi. But there were some distinct differences. The press is followed closely, as here in Ghana, and papers frequently sell out, another similarity, but the main difference lies in the variety of papers available. In Malawi, there are only three national newspapers, and one has such a low circulation that it is often overlooked.
“There used to be 20 newspapers, there are half now,” Brian Ligomeka, editor of The Daily Times, told me one afternoon on a drive though town. “There are more universities now,” Ligomeka continues, “we were expecting that as people were graduating, as the economy was growing, then the circulation of newspapers would grow. This has not been the case.” Newspapers dying? It sounded all too familiar. Ligomeka has made it the focus of his Masters thesis, and explained why he thinks there are so few surviving newspapers in Malawi. “Is it the impact of new media?” he pondered. He guesses that Malawians are increasingly accessing their news online, as opposed to in print, as is happening in the west.
I found this hard to believe, however, based on what I had gathered about internet in the country—the connection is often slow and access is sporadic, since most cannot afford to pay to log on in internet cafes. In fact, according to the World Bank, only 2.1 percent of Malawians have access to the web.
After a couple of weeks learning about the media in Malawi, the picture became clearer. There are only two printing presses in Blantyre, where most media organizations are located, and starting up a new printing press is expensive. This harsh economic reality has shut out anyone who has tried to edge in and publish their own papers. This means the country’s two main papers, The Daily Times and The Nation enjoy a monopoly over the printing press.
But things could be worse. Both papers are officially independent; free from political influence and towing party lines, which means the news coming from both is generally reliable and credible. The main impediment to producing unbiased news is the reliance on the government for advertising dollars, which can make editors weary about publishing anything too critical of the ruling party. The Nation got a bitter taste of this reality when all government advertising was cut from its pages a few months ago, leaving it scrambling for ad money from private companies and NGOs posting job vacancies.
Thankfully, the commitment to editorial integrity remains intact, despite the unwelcome reliance on politically-charged ads. “The media should not have to depend on government advertising,” Ligomeka says, adding that “journalists just have to be courageous anyway.”
