One of the areas surveyed as part of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report for South Africa is trusted news brands. Every year since 2019, News24 has been the news brand in South Africa that scores most highly. In 2025 for example, when asked “How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is?”, 81% of people surveyed said they trusted News24. It’s a record that the media group can be proud of.
Reuters always publishes a caveat, along the lines of “this should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands, as it is not exhaustive. Whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy is their subjective judgment, and the scores are aggregates of public opinion, not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness.” Still, it’s an indicator, and News24 values the notion of trust so much that it changed its company pay-off line from “Breaking News. First” to “Trusted News. First”.
This makes News24 an advocate for reputable journalism, and indeed, one imagines that its revenue model is built on this. Bearing all this in mind, here are some of the stories featured on News24, one of the most trusted news brands in South Africa, on July 28 2025.
There’s “Divorced Over a Paternity Scandal — What He Learns 10 Years Later Changes Everything”, which is the touching story of husband and wife Julian and Elara, whose friends saw them as the perfect married couple. “Julian, a real estate developer, and Elara, an artist, seemed to balance each other effortlessly, sharing a warm and loving home.”
Elara falls pregnant, much to the couple’s joy, and gives birth to triplets. “However, as the babies were handed over, Julian’s excitement quickly shifted to confusion and then disbelief — each child was of African descent, an undeniable reality that made his heart sink. Overwhelmed and unable to comprehend what he was seeing, he stood in stunned silence, the maternity ward’s once joyous atmosphere now replaced by an eerie stillness.”
Another fascinating piece of journalism is “Boy Keeps Making Strange Hand Signals During Flight — When Stewardess Realises Why, She Orders the Plane to Land”. I’m not sure what this one is actually about, as after scrolling past about 50 adverts, the story still hadn’t got to any appreciable point. There’s also the truly mysterious “University in Western Cape Ranked Worst in America”, as well as “The Western Cape Bridge That’s So Scary Even Locals Avoid It”.
Clicking on that last story’s headline takes to you an article with a different headline: “The World’s Most Dangerous Bridges, Ranked”. The list does not actually include a bridge from the Western Cape, nor indeed from Africa at all. At least the headline “Best Pergolas and Verandahs in South Africa 2025” does take you to a bland list of all possible types of pergolas and verandas that exist in the country, even if the list is AI generated.
Then there’s “At 70, Kevin Costner Found Love Again. Here’s Who He Is”. That one isn’t as explosive a revelation about Costner’s sexuality as you might hope, as I think they just cut off the end of the headline. And indeed, the same story appears on the Fox News website, except the formatting is a bit better so the full headline adds the crucial word “dating” at the end.
The reason Fox News and News24 are carrying links to the same story is, of course, because all these links are generated by Outbrain, a native advertising platform that partners with many publishers across the world to display recommendations and advertisements. These recommendations often appear at the bottom of articles, as with News24, and are designed to mimic the look and feel of the page they are on.
Outbrain’s platform provides a way for advertisers to promote their content on premium publisher websites by integrating with the existing content of those sites. This means that sites such as News24 can generate revenue from visitors who click on the Outbrain recommendations and engage with the advertised content.
In February, Outbrain completed its acquisition of Teads, and now operates under the Teads name, combining operations with more than 1,800 employees and 10,000 publisher partners worldwide. Teads touts itself as a global adtech platform that specialises in delivering native video advertising across premium publisher sites, helping advertisers reach billions of users monthly with “context-aware ad formats that blend seamlessly into content”. Which it makes sound like a good thing. Yay, we can’t tell the difference between journalism and junk. And to give you an idea of the sort of money we’re talking here, in 2022, Outbrain’s revenue was roughly $992m, in 2023 it was $935.8m, and it’s declined to a still respectable $889.9m in 2024.
Fox News also carries Outbrain stories, so I compared them with News24. “Young Woman (19) Lives in a Shed — Take a Look Inside” on News24 becomes “Young Woman Lives in a Shed in Western Cape — Don’t Cry When You See Inside” on Fox. I guess the AI headline generator tries a bit harder for Fox. When I used a VPN, Outbrain started feeding me more US-specific content on Fox, such as “Nebraska Dad Kills Himself & Family of Four Hours Before Son’s Graduation” and “Awkward Celebrity Prom Photos That Are Too Amazing Not To Obsess Over”.
The majority of the Outbrain stories that News24 and other news sites carry appear to be created by AI, and specifically designed to sucker readers into scrolling past endless advertising
The majority of the Outbrain stories that News24 and other news sites carry appear to be created by AI, and specifically designed to sucker readers into scrolling past endless advertising. These headline boxes that Outbrain places on News24’s pages are apparently called chumboxes. Chum, of course, is decomposing fish blood and guts that is thrown into the water to attract sharks, tuna and other predatory fish.
So the chumboxes on News24 perform a similar function, except we are the prey that they’re trying to hook with the rotting corpse of journalism. And as definitions of chumboxes point out, “this form of advertising is often associated with low-quality clickbait links and articles”.
Call me old-fashioned, but news websites that are involved in an existential battle for survival in the face of the cascading onslaught of clickbait, fake news websites, AI slop and sheer disinformation, all of which is destroying trust in the news, should not be part of the problem.
And they are quite literally part of the problem, in that they’ll sprinkle their own content in among the clickbait. That gives the garbage a veneer of respectability by association, but the obverse is also true: legitimate news sites are tainted by the untrustworthy tabloid grift that surrounds them.
There’s also something extremely stupid about spending a fortune cultivating a relationship of trust with your audience, a relationship painstakingly built so that you can successfully ask said audience to pay you money in exchange for the service you render, and then selling said audience for cents to a passel of grifters, con artists and AI text-extruding machines that spit out synthetic slop for profit. It creates a cognitive dissonance in your reader, that mental discomfort one experiences when forced to confront conflicting values that contradict your beliefs, in this case the belief that you are on a trustworthy news website.
It’s not just News24 by any means. I merely highlight it because it is “the most trusted news site in South Africa”, which makes the clickbait it carries all the more startling. Outbrain is also on TimesLive, for example (“CVS Hides This $1 Generic Viagra — Here’s The Aisle It’s Really In”). And according to Outbrain’s own website, its crappy content appears on Time, CNN, The Washington Post, MSN and many, many others.
We all know why this is happening. News sites are bleeding revenue due to a host of factors. The print cash cow died ages ago, so all that traditional advertising is long gone. Not only does digital advertising pay much less, the bulk of it goes to platforms, or algorithmically enhanced destinations, such as the very made-for-advertising websites that Outbrain sprays across the pages of legitimate news sites like the spatter from an incontinent dog. The dominance of tech giants in digital advertising, and the way they craft their platform algorithms to diminish the visibility of news sites and privilege empty engagement, is another existential threat to the sustainability of news media.
But is the answer really to sell off your trust capital for a pittance, and to actively help the purveyors of AI slop and clickbait garbage to destroy your audience’s rapidly eroding belief in their capacity to trust in what they read on news sites?
The time is fast approaching, if it’s not already here, when all that will stand between reputable news sites and their destruction is the relationship that they’ve built with their audience. If you are as ready to sell your loyal readers to the robot garbage merchants as social media platforms are to peddle controversy to their captured users, then you have absolutely no chance of still being part of the information ecosystem in the very near future.
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