When a newsroom becomes too small to think
THOMAS NKHOMA | Monday August 24, 2026 06:00
From the outside, everything appears normal. Yet journalism is one of those professions in which an institution can remain operational long after it has begun losing its capacity. Retrenchments, mergers and newsroom contractions are usually explained as business decisions. Advertising revenues are under pressure, digital platforms have changed the market and operating costs have risen. However, there is another economy inside a newsroom that rarely appears on a balance sheet: the economy of experience.
A journalist who has spent years covering Parliament, courts, business or doing investigative journalism, develops professional memory. They know which promises have been made before and which statistics deserve interrogation. When that journalist leaves, an organisation may save a salary but it also loses institutional memory.
The deeper question is what happens to journalism when the institutions producing it become progressively thinner. MISA Botswana’s concern about this direction is significant because shrinking newsrooms could eventually leave the country with insufficient capacity to perform journalism’s difficult work. Technology can make publishing faster but it cannot make journalism instantaneous. The difficult part has never been pressing the publish button. It is finding the story, establishing what is true, understanding its context and checking competing claims.
Those things require time and time is increasingly becoming a casualty of the shrinking newsroom. When two or three journalists are expected to perform work once done by a much larger editorial team, the language used is often “efficiency”. Conversely, there is a point at which efficiency becomes depletion.
A journalist covering Parliament in the morning, attending court in the afternoon and producing digital updates at night may appear highly productive. Yet more content does not necessarily mean more journalism.
A newsroom needs time to read, think, check sources and question whether the first version of a story is actually the right one. A newsroom that has no time to think risks becoming a newsroom that merely reacts.
Society has not become less complicated. Corruption does not become easier to investigate because an allegation can be posted online within seconds. Public finances do not become easier to understand because a budget speech can be livestreamed.
A court judgment does not require less scrutiny because its headline can be published immediately. Society continues to demand professional journalism even as its economic model weakens. Someone must still investigate, cultivate sources, verify documents and return to a story after the initial excitement disappears.
There is a wider economic paradox. Local media organisations carry much of the cost of producing journalism while global digital platforms increasingly capture the attention and advertising surrounding that content. This should force Botswana to think more seriously about the economics of information. Mergers also deserve careful scrutiny. Consolidation can create stronger organisations, reduce duplication and improve the use of scarce resources. But it can also become an elegant word for contraction.
If a merger produces a better-resourced newsroom with stronger investigative capacity, society benefits. If it simply means fewer journalists producing more material, the organisation may improve its balance sheet while weakening its journalism. Media owners must, therefore, recognise that journalists are not simply a cost centre. They are the intellectual capital of the organisation. An experienced reporter with credible sources and years of institutional knowledge represents an asset, even if conventional accounting does not recognise it.
Experienced journalists also provide mentorship, teaching younger reporters how to recognise weak sources, ask the second question, distinguish allegation from evidence and understand the ethical consequences of publication. When that experience disappears, a newsroom may become younger without becoming stronger. Government also has a role, although it should not be expected to rescue every struggling media organisation. Public advertising should never reward favourable coverage.
But government’s communication expenditure inevitably affects the sustainability of local media. There is therefore a legitimate policy conversation about supporting diverse media without compromising editorial independence. Ultimately, the question is not whether media organisations should make money. They must. Journalism cannot remain independent if the institutions producing it are permanently financially fragile.
The real question is what business model can sustain journalism without consuming the professional capacity that gives it value.
Botswana should, therefore, resist measuring the health of its media industry simply by counting newspapers, websites and radio stations. The more important question is how much journalism they are actually capable of producing.
A country can have abundant information and still suffer from an information deficit: more communication but less understanding. The decline of the newsroom rarely happens dramatically. One experienced reporter leaves. Another is retrenched.
A specialist desk disappears. Investigative reporting becomes occasional. Follow-up stories become rare. The remaining journalists become consumed by the daily production cycle. Eventually, the institution still exists but its capacity has changed.
Perhaps that is the real warning contained in Botswana’s shrinking newsrooms. The danger is not simply fewer journalists. It is that we may gradually become accustomed to having too few journalists to think deeply about the country we are becoming.
*Thomas Tlhaloganyo Nkhoma is MISA-Botswana chairperson