On Thursday, 10 September, in central London, journalists and media managers gathered for the Future of Media Technology Conference, a one-day event hosted by Press Gazette. Central to the discussions was how publishers could best operate in a digital-first world, as the platforms they've always relied on for distribution are now delivering that information directly to audiences themselves, bypassing the publishers altogether.
The question is one of both visibility and value. A study jointly released by The Journalism Relay Project, The Media Leadership Think Tank (MLTT) at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and The International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) on Tuesday, 1 September on 263 South African news websites found that just 30.4% explicitly blocked at least one AI crawler.
This is largely due to publishers' fear of website traffic decline. Blocking access also risks cutting publishers, especially smaller or independent publishers, off from Google and other platforms they depend on for audience referrals.
Still, according to the Competition Commission's data, AI chatbots sent just under 2-million visits to 222 South African news websites between January and May 2025, less than 1% of the 256-million total chatbot visits recorded in that period.
The result? Publishers invest in producing journalism, while audiences receive that same information through AI-generated summaries without visiting the organisations that produce the original work. As traffic to websites continues to decline, publishers all around the world are reconsidering how they can reach and retain audiences.
The London conference held at the beginning of the month prompted publishers to reassess measures of success, especially around clicks. App downloads, repeat visits and newsletter sign-ups are highly favourable alongside traditional traffic metrics.
News organisations are also placing journalists more prominently in front of audiences and experimenting with creator-led formats. Yet, the recurring tool most conducive to building a direct relationship with audiences, while also less dependent on platform algorithms, is still the newsletter.
Well-resourced UK newsrooms are still testing which of these relationship-building tactics justify the investment, but several of South Africa's most resource-constrained newsrooms have already implemented aspects of the model.
The Digital News Transformation Fund's first 21 participating newsrooms are a prime example. Using early-stage funding, they've built digital platforms, expanded reach and started exploring new revenue models from close to zero.
The Kokstad Advertiser, for instance, moved from having no digital presence to reaching up to 354 000 people per month. Explain grew its audience from approximately 3 800 users in January 2026 to more than 60 000 by May 2026, and now draws more than half of its income from non-grant sources.
If publishers cannot rely on platforms to send their audiences to their journalism, sustainability will depend on what they can control themselves: their audience relationships, their distribution and, ultimately, the value of their content.
Getting journalism online might have improved accessibility — but it also left the work journalists do exposed to AI systems extracting it without proper attribution or compensation, a reality publishers will have to face themselves since it's not one these platforms are likely to change.
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*Image courtesy of Canva
**Information sourced from Mail & Guardian, Daily Maverick and Reuters