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 mid-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 lev…