LUKANYO MNYANDA: Resource and skills gap causes financial journalism to forgo watchdog role

Newspapers are seen at a vendor’s stand along a road in Ikoyi district, Lagos. Picture: REUTERS

I would argue that this expectation is unrealistic. In the corporate scandals that dominated the news over the past few years, the media’s role was notably reactive. It wasn’t a journalist who broke the Steinhoff story — most of the best work on what is regarded as SA’s biggest corporate fraud so far came after the company announced that it had uncovered “accounting irregularities”. It was only then that the media produced some insightful investigations and analyses.

News doesn’t happen in the newsroom, the saying goes. And very few potential sources of information that expose wrongdoing will share it, at potentially great personal risk, with people they don’t know. That’s not to say we should give up on journalists’ role as watchdogs. As a society we should decide how much value we place on it. Consumers demand it from journalists, but aren’t willing to pay for news.

Investigations take time and money. Performance appraisals of journalists are simultaneously skewed towards quantity. What increasingly matters is the number of stories journalists produce rather than the quality of their work. Having a journalist spend days, let alone weeks or months, on a single story is seen as a luxury that very few media houses think they can afford.

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