Founded in 1998 and owned by Media24, the print division of Naspers, News24 began with a very small newsroom that relied heavily on wire copy, but in recent years, they have completely transformed their operations, News24’s Deputy Multimedia Editor, Nokuthula Manyathi, told participants of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Africa virtual conference in July.

“In the past six years, we’ve almost doubled our newsroom and we’ve introduced new streams that produce investigative journalism, analysis, opinion and narrative, documentaries all under the umbrella of a fast-news environment,” she said.

Moving to a subscription model has helped bring about many of these changes and is contributing substantially to News24’s coverage.

“We now have more than 50,000 subscribers, and thanks to our subscribers we have been able to break new ground in our reporting: We’ve shined an investigative light on our power utility. We’ve looked at the state security agency. We’ve investigated a Christian mission station that’s been accused of abuse and money laundering, as well as abuse and grooming at elite schools across South Africa,” she said.

“Because of our subscribers,” she continued, “we have been able to experiment and spend more time telling our stories on different platforms.”

One of these platforms is podcasting.

Finding their way with audio

News24 launched its first podcast in 2018, which was a weekly 20-to-40 minute discussion of political news, Manyathi said. 

“We had a level of success, but we discovered that high level of success depended on what was trending versus what was essential. And because our team was so small, we couldn’t produce more than one show a week, making it hard to compete with established broadcasters, which could deliver updates on the hour,” she said.

News24 rethought its approach and launched another podcast called The Story, which was again weekly, but this time the focus was on the biggest breaking news.

“We made it bite-sized, so about 15 minutes,” Manyathi said. “We had reporters from our newsroom come in and discuss the biggest story of the week and give us a bit more background.” 

While The Story was not an immediate runaway success, News24 kept plugging away, and today, are happy with what they have achieved.

“We kept at it, and now, about four years later, we don’t have a large audience pool, but we have an engaged one, and that’s what’s become important to us: We want people to be engaged, we want people to sit and listen to our audio,” Manyathi said.

‘You have to keep at it’

This led News24 to the first of four major lessons they’ve learned about podcasting. “Part of breaking into the market, or finding your place in it, rather, is that you have to keep at it,” she said.

“What we’ve found is that a large part of success in the digital space is consistency, and sometimes things take a while to stick. So not everything is going to go viral at first. Even if it does, you still need to keep your audience interested,” Manyathi added.

A related learning was the need for “research, research and more research,” she said.

Something else they did was to look for podcasting inspiration and lessons abroad from markets such as the US and the UK.

“We looked around to see what other people are doing and what could we do here at News24?” she said.

‘A sea change in understanding how to present podcasts’

In 2019, Manyathi said News24 decided to partner with a Johannesburg writer named Deon Wiggett, who had produced a podcast series called My Only Story, where he tracked down the man who abused him and a group of others 20 years ago.

“We were a publishing partner meaning we had exclusive rights to the podcast episodes and the subsequent reporting. And we had a dual publishing model, meaning that he told his story on audio as well as via text. After years of trial and error, this was finally our big win, and that taught us another lesson: It’s not enough to have a good product, people should know about it,” she said.

“My Only Story was a sea change in helping us to understand how to present podcasts to our audience,” Manyathi added. “Since podcasts are not our primary function, it’s essential to meet people where they are. So through our in-depth and roving reporting of Deon’s quest for justice, we were able to entice a large portion of our audience that enjoys reading.”

While she acknowledges that she was initially sceptical about the hybrid publishing model of podcasts connected to stories in written form due to fears of cannibalising the audience, Manyathi said, in fact, the reverse turned out to be true.

Engagement and traction

“What we found was that people who were reading our reporting were also then clicking through to the podcast. And that really, really helped with our engagement and traction of the podcast. And that is the model we have used in subsequent projects and it’s really proved to be very successful,” she said.

A further example of this was a News24 podcast they did in 2020 called Exodus, which was a four-part investigative series about a Christian mission station facing allegations of abuse and money laundering.

The podcast was published alongside a documentary and a series of in-depth, investigative articles.

“Our primary focus was just getting the information to the reader’s doorstep,” Manyathi said. “If you love video, we’ve got you. If you love reading, we’ve got you. If audio is your thing, here’s a podcast. And to date, we’re two years out, we haven’t received any backlash from our audience. No one has complained about duplication or multiplication of content. Each platform compliments each other and feeds into one another.”

Free podcasts, but in-depth reporting for subscribers only

She added that the project was really helpful in that it was also a bit of an experiment. “We offered the podcast exclusively to our subscribers, and we got a great deal of engagement, so a large volume of minutes listened to, but the listenership wasn’t as high.”

News24’s concerns for having a sustainable business model for their journalism sent them back to the drawing board, Manyathi said.

Last year, they embarked on another investigative podcast project called “My Only Story: Back to School.” Once again they collaborated with Deon Wiggett, and this time they investigated abuse allegations at elite private schools in South Africa. (Editor’s note: This podcast won our African Digital Media Award for “Best Use of Audio.” See more and the full list of winners here)

News24 published six investigations a week, Manyathi said. This time around, they only used audio and text as their primary modes of reporting, and while they offered the podcasts for free, the related in-depth reporting was only available to their subscribers.

“People were able to access the podcast in their favourite podcast store, and we were able to offer our subscribers exclusive content through our written reporting,” she said. “This was a sweet spot for us. The podcast was accessible to everyone. Online we were topping the charts in terms of iTunes and Spotify in South Africa. We were either the No. 1 or No. 2 spot on the charts. I think right now we are sitting at close to 1 million downloads, with upwards of 800,000 downloads.”

Meanwhile, the written articles were a great subscription driver, she said.

“The project was probably one of our best performing, or rather highest converting to subscribers of all the projects we did last year. So the lesson we took from here is ‘the more the merrier.’ The more platforms that you can cover a story on, the more people you can capture and the more people you can engage with different platforms or formats of storytelling. The content doesn’t have to elbow each other out, it can just work really well together,” Manyathi said.

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