For years now, one phrase has stood out in conversations about newspapers in Cameroon: print is dying. And honestly, the evidence sometimes appears difficult to ignore.
Some years back, I was assigned to do checks and balances with a popular newspaper vendor in the town of Buea, South West region. The experience really shaped my thoughts and perspective of the newspaper as a business. Thousands of copies of newspapers remained unsold and ultimately ended up as parceling paper for roadside vendors.
Initially, I believed the vendor in question was using lack of sales as a means to throw us off and not pay but after an intense 2-week period of follow up, they gave me access to their archives and what I saw left me shocked. Of course some copies often went unaccounted for but there were thousands of unsold copies dating many months back lying around.
Why were people not buying or reading despite the low cost?
Both older and younger audiences increasingly consume news through TikTok clips, WhatsApp forwards, Facebook posts, and online blogs. Advertising revenues continue shrinking and of course, printing costs don’t seem ready to stop rising yet. And for some reason, it is hard to blame the consumers and even advertisers. For both groups, their use of print media largely depends on timeliness and reach respectively.
Why wait until Monday morning to read the news when a single swipe can bring it to your phone that same Friday night as events unfold?
Why advertise with a media organ whose monthly print run is a tenth of the daily reach of a blog, website or online platform?
Credibility could be the answer if it was found offline only.
A recent PhD study by Cameroonian researcher Abah Isidore captures this reality vividly. The research titled ‘The Political Economy of the print media: its state, challenges and prospects for Journalists practice in Cameroon,’ paints a troubling picture of a print media industry struggling under economic hardship, weak circulation systems, poor advertising culture, declining readership, and of course, political pressures. In many ways, the diagnosis is accurate.
But I disagree with one popular conclusion people often rush toward: that newspapers are finished. Cameroon’s newspapers are struggling, yes. But they are far from dead. In fact, I am of the school of thought that shares the belief that the future of traditional media in Cameroon depends on the one thing many newspapers once feared most: digital transformation.
The real crisis is not necessarily that people no longer want journalism. It is that audiences now consume information differently and so even the process and outlook of journalism is forced to wear a digital mask to remain appealing and recognisable. Media organisations that fail to adapt to those changing habits risk disappearing, not because journalism itself has lost value, but because the methods of delivery have changed and they are still stuck in their old ways.
Across the world, traditional media houses are learning this lesson, some painfully. The successful ones are no longer thinking of themselves simply as “newspapers,” “radio stations,” or “television houses.” They are becoming digital information ecosystems just to retain their place on readers’ bedside cupboards.
Cameroon cannot escape that transition. Some media organisations have smelled the coffee and are already evolving. One example I know closely is The Guardian Post, Cameroon’s lone English-language daily newspaper. A few years ago, the paper’s digital and social media presence remained limited despite its strong newsroom culture and editorial relevance. Yet, audience behaviour was rapidly changing. Part of my own contribution there involved helping initiate and organise the paper’s embrace of social media and structured online visibility. The goal was not to abandon traditional journalism, but to ensure that strong journalism could survive within a changing media environment.
What followed became increasingly clear: audiences still valued credible journalism. They still want breaking news, political analysis, cultural reporting, investigations, and public interest stories. But they want these to meet them where they are – on their phones, tablets, and computers, and in formats adapted to modern consumption habits. This lesson matters beyond one newsroom.
Too often, discussions about print media in Cameroon focus only on decline. We speak about falling sales, weak government support, poor reading culture, or the collapse of advertising. All of these challenges are real. Media owners complain, sometimes rightly, that the environment does not favour sustainable media business growth. Even government aid to private media is frequently described as ‘shoe-string support,’ insufficient for the realities that newsrooms face.
But ‘free’ government handouts have never built a handsfree media ecosystem. And nostalgia and good old memories alone will not ensure their survival. In fact, it may as well be one of the reasons why many are reluctant to embrace the change and reinvent themselves.
The irony is that some of the strengths newspapers possess today are exactly what digital audiences increasingly need. At a time of misinformation, viral falsehoods, manipulated content, and AI-generated confusion, credibility is a far more worthy currency than it ever was. With this alone, newspapers still retain the upper hand when it comes to depth, verification, structure, editorial accountability, and institutional memory.
One of the most pertinent observations from Abah’s PhD study is the rise of what he terms “Alleluia Journalism” – praise-singing reporting shaped by financial survival, political proximity, and the search for institutional favour. It also revisits the regularly beaten path of “gombo journalism,” exposing newsroom vulnerability, and ethical compromise in environments where journalists and publishers often operate with limited resources and weak institutional protection.
Abah’s findings suggest that the economic struggles of newspapers do not only affect business operations, but increasingly shape journalism itself, influencing editorial independence, newsroom priorities, and public trust. Interestingly, despite documenting the severe challenges confronting the sector, the study argues that print journalism in Cameroon still retains major strengths including professionalism, fact-based reporting, credibility, and in-depth reporting.
Hardly any journalist who has practiced in the Centre region for example would feign ignorance of the concept of “hiltoniers.” And while it paints a bad picture of the profession, the bright side is that admitting their existence is also admitting the existence and prominence of journalists (and therefore newsrooms) of repute and trust.
Social media may win the race for speed, but traditional journalism still wins where trust and context matter. The challenge is whether media houses can modernise without losing those professional values. That is why we at Camer Today believe the future of Cameroonian newspapers does not lie in choosing between print and digital, but in successfully combining both.
The smartest media organisations will likely be those that preserve journalistic standards while adapting aggressively to digital realities. From the amazing stories of the yesteryears we have heard, newspaper newsrooms and newsroom culture today has greatly shifted from what it was ten and twenty years ago. This alone is watertight proof that the newsroom of tomorrow won’t look like that of today. It will be multimedia-driven, audience-conscious, digitally distributed, and increasingly interactive.
Journalists themselves will need new skills ranging from mobile storytelling to data verification and audience engagement. And the newspapers (and their reporters) too will have to display more accountability than they have ever imagined, thanks to the feedback loop digital platforms provide.
This transition will not be easy, especially for smaller media houses already operating under severe financial strain. Some newspapers may still disappear. Others may merge, shrink, or fully transition online. But that does not mean journalism dies with them. If anything, the current moment may be forcing Cameroon’s newspaper industry into a long overdue evolution. The newspapers that survive will definitely not be the ones resisting change, but the ones bold enough to reinvent themselves while holding onto the values that made journalism important in the first place.