Commentary on Franz Krüger, Sarah H. Chiumbu and Herman Wasserman (eds), Media on the Margins in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). By Prof. Carol Azungi Dralega
Community media are often celebrated for their promise of participation, empowerment, local voice and democratic inclusion. These ideals matter. But what happens when they meet the material realities of journalism? Who owns the media, who sets the agenda, whose voices are heard, and what resources are available to sustain meaningful public participation?
These are among the questions raised by Media on the Margins in South Africa, edited by Franz Krüger, Sarah H. Chiumbu and Herman Wasserman. Drawing on research into radio, print, television and online media, the volume examines the conditions under which media serving socioeconomically marginalised communities operate. Its central contribution is to move beyond celebrating community media as a category and investigate the inequalities that shape their actual capacity to serve the public.
For African journalism scholarship, this is an important shift: democratic value cannot be inferred from a media organisation’s label, location or stated mission. It must be examined in relation to power, resources, representation, labour and accountability.
From the promise of community media to the realities of power
Across many African countries, broadcasting developed under colonial control and, after independence, often remained closely tied to the state. Liberalisation from the late twentieth century expanded the space for private broadcasting and new forms of public expression. Community media emerged as part of a wider ambition to make communication more participatory and responsive to communities whose experiences had been excluded from dominant media narratives.
South Africa’s trajectory is distinctive. Its democratic transition created an opportunity to establish a three-tier broadcasting system comprising public, commercial and community media. Licensing and institutional support sought to secure a place for community broadcasting within the national media landscape.
Three decades later, the question is not simply whether community media have survived, but whether the institutional arrangements intended to support them have enabled them to fulfil their democratic promise.
The editors acknowledge that South Africa is atypical in several respects. Its experience should not be treated as a template for the continent. Rather, it offers an unusually revealing case through which to examine the relationship between media policy, structural inequality and access to information. The book’s relevance beyond South Africa lies in the questions it raises, not in the assumption that its findings apply uniformly elsewhere.
Marginality as a conceptual contribution
The book’s most important theoretical intervention appears in Chapter 2. Krüger, Chiumbu and Wasserman argue that categories such as local, alternative and community do not, on their own, adequately explain the conditions under which media organisations operate. They propose marginality as a cross-cutting analytical lens that foregrounds structural inequality and unequal access to resources and power.
This matters because organisations carrying the same label may occupy very different positions. A community radio station serving a remote rural population may face severe financial and infrastructural constraints, while an urban station serving a relatively well-resourced community of interest may enjoy considerably greater advantages.
Marginality is therefore not simply a question of size or geographical location. It concerns the relationship between media organisations, the communities they serve and the wider structures that enable or constrain their work.
For African journalism, this approach offers a useful corrective to classifications that treat community media as a relatively uniform sector. It encourages researchers and practitioners to ask a more demanding question: under what conditions can a particular media organisation provide relevant information, facilitate participation and hold power accountable?
The political economy of survival
The volume’s chapters on policy and business models demonstrate why these questions cannot be separated from material conditions.
Chapter 5 examines the South African state’s role in developing and supporting local and community media, including through grants, indirect subsidies and official advertising. Such support can help sustain media organisations that would otherwise struggle to survive. Yet dependence on the state can also create vulnerabilities, particularly where political interests threaten editorial independence.
Chapter 6 develops this argument through an examination of community radio and independent local print. It documents precarious business models, dependence on commercial income and significant state involvement. These pressures are not evenly distributed: organisations serving poorer and more remote communities may face greater constraints than those serving comparatively advantaged audiences.
The implications are important. It is unreasonable to assess all community media against the same expectations without considering their unequal material circumstances. At the same time, resource constraints cannot simply excuse weaknesses in representation or accountability. The challenge is to understand how structural conditions shape journalistic performance without abandoning scrutiny of democratic outcomes.
The book thus moves the discussion beyond whether community media are committed to public service and towards the conditions under which they can realistically provide it.
Being local does not guarantee democratic value
The volume becomes particularly revealing when it examines media content.
In Chapter 8, Enock Sithole analyses 11 South African community radio stations. Local content accounted for an average of 36% of the broadcast time examined, while local news and information averaged 7%. These figures are drawn from a limited, purposively selected sample and are not representative of all South African community radio. Nevertheless, they expose a tension between the expectation that community stations provide locally relevant information and the practical realities of producing it.
Chapter 9 examines eight community newspapers. The authors found that 88.2% of the articles were locally focused, but sport, community news and crime featured prominently. This is not evidence that such topics lack public value: local sport and community reporting can strengthen identity and participation. The more important question is whether the range of coverage also equips citizens to understand political decisions and wider developments affecting their lives.
Together, these chapters challenge the assumption that local content automatically produces meaningful public-interest journalism. Proximity matters, but so do the subjects covered, the voices included and the questions journalists are able to pursue.
Chapter 4 offers a related insight through its study of Grocott’s Mail in Makhanda. Rod Amner and Aphiwe Ngowapi examine the newspaper as part of a wider communication ecosystem involving social media, civic organisations, government and informal networks. Their analysis shows that local communication is shaped by relationships, mistrust and unequal capacities—not simply by the presence of a local news organisation.
The lesson is clear: being close to a community does not automatically guarantee trust, inclusion or accountability.
The people who sustain journalism
The book also examines the labour behind community media.
Chapter 10 explores the motivations and experiences of community media leaders, including their commitment to public service and the pressures of operating with limited resources. Chapter 11, by Shepi Mati, focuses on amaVolontiya, the volunteers who help sustain community radio.
Volunteering can create opportunities for participation, skills development and social connection. Yet in economically insecure settings, it may also be shaped by unemployment and the search for work experience or future opportunities.
This raises a difficult question about resilience. When media organisations survive because people contribute substantial unpaid labour, their commitment is evident. But that commitment should not be confused with institutional sustainability.
The volume’s treatment of volunteers is valuable because it makes visible the human costs that can disappear behind celebratory accounts of community participation. It also recognises that these spaces can generate solidarity and forms of collective agency that are not reducible to financial performance.
Digital opportunities, persistent inequalities
The book’s final section examines digital transformation and disinformation.
In Chapter 12, Sarah Chiumbu compares Hillbrow Radio, an online-only youth-led station, with rural Mbhashe FM. The cases demonstrate how digital tools can expand opportunities for communication while reproducing inequalities in infrastructure, data affordability and digital capacity. They also show that technology alone does not guarantee shared decision-making: participation can remain consultative rather than genuinely collaborative.
Chapter 13, by Herman Wasserman and Meli M. Ncube, turns to the challenges of identifying and responding to disinformation. Community journalists operate close to the communities affected by local information disorders, but may lack the resources, institutional support and verification tools available to better-resourced organisations.
The wider implication is that digital transformation does not make marginality disappear. The inequalities shaping traditional media can also constrain participation and journalistic capacity online.
What remains underdeveloped?
The book’s conceptual framework is useful, but its emphasis also creates questions for further research.
First, Chapter 2 explicitly foregrounds socioeconomic marginality while acknowledging that gender and other identity-based dimensions could not be explored fully because of space. Gender nevertheless appears elsewhere in the volume, including in discussions of women’s representation in management and gender-specific harassment of journalists. The criticism, therefore, is not that gender is absent, but that it is not developed as a sustained analytical dimension of marginality across the collection. How do gender, age, language and other forms of exclusion intersect with socioeconomic disadvantage to shape who owns media, who produces journalism and whose voices are heard?
Second, the emphasis on structural constraints risks allowing marginality to be understood primarily through deprivation. The book itself offers counterpoints: volunteers generate solidarity, community media leaders develop creative forms of audience engagement, and Hillbrow Radio combines digital broadcasting with direct community initiatives. These examples show that the margins are not merely sites of constraint; they can also be spaces of agency, experimentation and collective action. A fuller theorisation of marginality could bring these productive capacities into more explicit conversation with structural inequality.
Third, the book raises a methodological question about decolonising media research. Chapter 9 acknowledges that its newspaper sample excluded KwaZulu-Natal because the available online community newspaper, published in isiZulu, presented a language barrier for the researchers. This is a transparent limitation, and it should not be treated as a concealed flaw. Yet it has wider implications: if language determines which media can be included in a study, whose experiences become visible in the resulting knowledge?
This question does not invalidate the chapter’s findings. Rather, it invites African journalism researchers to consider how multilingual research capacity, collaboration and translation might broaden the evidence on which scholarship is built.
Reading South Africa from East Africa
These questions resonate with Uganda’s broadcasting history. Liberalisation in the early 1990s led to rapid growth in private FM broadcasting, creating more outlets for news, discussion and public expression. However, the expansion of private broadcasting should not be equated with community ownership or control. Questions of ownership, political influence and the relationship between broadcasters and the communities they serve remain important to understanding media pluralism in Uganda.
The South African experience provides a useful point of comparison precisely because its formal community broadcasting framework differs from Uganda’s media trajectory. It shows that establishing a designated community tier does not, by itself, guarantee equitable resources, editorial independence or meaningful participation. Conversely, the growth of broadcasting outlets does not necessarily establish that communities have control over the media serving them.
The comparison should not erase differences between the two countries. Its value lies in opening questions that can be investigated across distinct political, economic and linguistic contexts.
Beyond the label
Media on the Margins in South Africa does not offer a single prescription for community media, nor should it be expected to. Its strength lies in bringing conceptual analysis into conversation with empirical research on policy, funding, content, labour and digital change.
For African editors, educators and researchers, the book offers a more demanding way to evaluate community journalism. Are organisations assessed according to their labels, or the conditions in which they operate? Does local content provide citizens with the information they need to scrutinise power? Is resilience sustainable, or does it depend on the sacrifice of poorly resourced workers and volunteers? And who remains excluded when communication moves online?
The volume also contributes to a wider intellectual task: developing media scholarship that takes African experiences seriously as sources of theory, rather than treating them merely as cases to which concepts developed elsewhere are applied.
Ultimately, the democratic value of community media cannot be assumed. It must be examined in relation to power, resources, representation, labour, technology and accountability.
The margins are not simply where journalism happens. They are where the inequalities shaping journalism become visible—and where alternative ways of producing and sharing knowledge can emerge.