Moroccan journalism remains trapped between state dependency and market pressure, and its survival may depend on turning information into sustainable public value rather than cheap content for clicks. 

Many newspapers around the world today face a deep financial crisis that goes beyond technical and editorial challenges and other crises linked to the essence of the profession. It is a real crisis affecting their economic model, at least since the beginning of the third millennium, when companies and journalistic institutions, especially print ones, entered what researchers Philip Meyer and Yuan Zhang described as the “death spiral”: successive financial crises lead to budget cuts, the quality of content declines, readers turn away, sales and advertising shares shrink, and this worsens the crisis in a vicious circle (1). 

The digital boom has further complicated this situation. Publishers thought that moving to electronic, digital publishing would reduce production costs and stop there, but they later discovered that the structural shifts produced by digital transformations had overturned the rules of competition and radically changed patterns of news consumption. 

This is a structural crisis; that is, it is not accidental or circumstantial, but reflects a deep structural flaw in the “traditional” economic model of journalism, which has continued to rely on advertising as a main source of funding. This has made media institutions and companies vulnerable to the influence of funders and to the unequal logic of the market. 

This is a structural crisis; that is, it is not accidental or circumstantial, but reflects a deep structural flaw in the “traditional” economic model of journalism (2), which has continued to rely on advertising as a main source of funding. 

The Moroccan Case: A Fragile and Eroding Economic Model 

In the Moroccan case, the crisis of the economic model takes on more complex dimensions, because most actors in the sector, whether in print or digital journalism, rely on limited and ineffective funding channels, most notably advertising, sales, AdSense revenues and public support, in the absence of clearly defined public policies on the condition and future of these institutions that would take them out of the bracket of crisis according to a clear strategic and gradual path (3). 

This crisis-ridden situation has cast light on the editorial independence of these newspapers, and opened the way for practices that focus on sensationalism and superficial content to attract audiences. This has contributed to the erosion of trust between journalism and the public, and weakened journalism’s ability to perform its role as a main and reliable source of news. 

To understand the structural nature of the crisis, one must go back; that is, to the origins of Moroccan journalism in a structural context that was not concerned with developing it as an independent economic institution, but rather as a political or diplomatic tool. During the French Protectorate, journalism became a propaganda platform funded by the colonial state, through particular newspapers such as L’Écho du Maroc and La Vigie Marocaine, which played essential roles in spreading the discourse of the Protectorate and consolidating its legitimacy (4). 

In the Moroccan case, the crisis of the economic model takes on more complex dimensions, because most actors in the sector, whether in print or digital journalism, rely on limited and ineffective funding channels, most notably advertising, online marketing revenues, sales and public support. 

After independence, journalism inherited this pattern: party and official newspapers continued to depend on party or government, state, financial support, without relying on the market or readers as a sustainable source of funding. Thus, a fragile economic institutionalisation took shape, one that did not establish the journalistic project as a media enterprise, or company, standing on its own, but rather kept it hostage to relations of power, authority, and political and symbolic instrumentalisation. 

In the decades that followed independence, the state remained the central controller of funding sources: government advertising and selective public support, alongside a restrictive legislative framework. With the beginning of the 1990s and the entry into a period of media openness, the experience of private newspapers emerged: Assabah, Le Journal, TelQuel, Al Ahdath Al Maghribia, Al Massae and other newspapers. But they were often characterised by funding from businessmen, or through a network of party support, which kept their economic independence governed by funding sources linked to political or economic power. True, they left their mark on a new professional horizon, but they were unable to rid themselves of the legacy of financial dependence on state support or shifting political environments. This produced economic models that were permanently exposed to financial fragility, increased their dependence on cross-border platforms such as Google and Facebook, and deprived them of the ability to turn information into an autonomous and sustainable economic value. 

The historical dimension of Moroccan journalism provides a direct explanation for a central question: why has the economic model of Moroccan journalism remained stuck in its structural crisis despite digital transformations? The truth is that Moroccan journalism never had a solid foundation linking its economic independence to its editorial independence. Rather, it has always remained hostage to successive external factors: first the Protectorate authorities, then the state and the political, party, actor. This meant that it entered the digital context burdened with a fragile structure incapable of establishing an independent and sustainable media enterprise. 

The historical dimension of Moroccan journalism provides a direct explanation for a central question: why has the economic model of Moroccan journalism remained stuck in its structural crisis despite digital transformations? The truth is that Moroccan journalism never had a solid foundation linking its economic independence to its editorial independence. Rather, it has always remained hostage to successive external factors. 

Accordingly, this historical dimension can also be connected to a wider circle linked to fragility. The limited attempts to open up to alternative funding models, such as paid content (5), remain limited in their spread within the Moroccan journalistic field because of a set of structural and socio-economic factors. On the one hand, this model faces deep-rooted cultural resistance among an audience that has for many years become accustomed to free access to news content through electronic, digital media, which makes the idea of paying for news collide with entrenched social representations of media as a public service or as something available free of charge. On the other hand, economic factors overlap, especially as there are proportions of “digital consumers” who belong to social groups with limited purchasing power, which weakens the chances of success for the paid subscription model outside elite groups. 

In addition, there are no official, institutional initiatives to support this shift towards paid content, whether through carefully designed strategies produced by public policies and ministries with overlapping competences, such as the Ministry of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform, or through strategies by actors in the advertising market, who still prefer to invest in social media platforms with wider reach and immediate direct impact. All these factors place the paid economic model before structural challenges requiring deep treatment, including rebuilding the relationship of trust with the public, improving the quality of services provided, and thinking about hybrid formulas that combine free content and paid content within flexible and sustainable strategies. 

Lost Independence 

The structural dimension of the crisis of Moroccan journalism cannot be understood separately from the system in which it moves and its internal structure. This becomes clear within the dialectic of the journalistic field and the origins of media ownership. The history of press management in Morocco has witnessed a duality that tends to combine the symbolic dominance of the state with the desire to control the public sphere. With the beginning of the 1990s, and amid the wave of privatisation and economic openness, a gradual shift emerged in the nature of owners: from party or trade-union actors to economic, political or academic actors, that is, from outside the journalistic field, the system of training and career path, who entered the field either for investment or for the purpose of political and economic influence. 

The crisis of the economic model cannot be separated from the condition of media ownership. The relationship between funding and editorial work is not a simple hierarchical relationship, but a complex one based essentially on a system of values, the ethics of the profession, foremost among them professionalism and independence. 

These transformations created a deep imbalance in the logic of editorial independence. Journalistic institutions were no longer governed primarily by the rules of the profession, by contributing to public debate and influencing public opinion, but in many cases became extensions of circles of influence and symbolic or economic capital. Hence, the crisis of the economic model cannot be separated from the condition of media ownership. The relationship between funding and editorial work is not a simple hierarchical relationship, but a complex one based essentially on a system of values, the ethics of the profession, foremost among them professionalism and independence. Nevertheless, the stakes of institutions, especially those that secure for themselves a comfortable position in the advertising market or favour with authority, may weaken these values and negatively affect the nature of the relationship between funder and editorial work. 

Accordingly, any discussion of editorial independence in Moroccan newspapers is fundamentally linked to the structure of ownership and the institution’s position within the journalistic field, more than it is linked only to editorial or professional competence. From this standpoint, any discussion about building an alternative economic model will be of no use unless it is accompanied by a deep review of the ownership structure, and by the establishment of professional and accountability mechanisms that guarantee a real separation between the logic of funding and the logic of editorial production (6). 

The Information Economy and Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Digital Journalism 

Moroccan journalistic institutions have, up to today, been unable to turn information into economic value, that is, into a “public good”, if one may borrow the language of economics, no less important than education and health (7). The majority of journalistic institutions still retain the traditional economic structure, which makes them unable to innovate and invest in the required manner. 

Transferring information from its economic space to the public sphere is a transition that establishes a view of media as a public service, and rearranges the priorities of journalism at a time when media capital controls newsroom strategy. It frees journalism from the shackles of the degraded consumerist treatment of information. This means that information is not merely a commercial option, but a channel through which the relationship between the consumer and the producer of information, the journalist, is consolidated within a public-social space. 

Major media institutions such as The Washington Post, El País and other large newspapers confronted the crisis of the model by developing the structure of information, the system of reference frameworks, legislation, professional ethics and sources of funding, and by searching for new alternatives in funding sources, while developing and diversifying news content that keeps pace with accelerating digital transformations, without ignoring artificial intelligence and its waves (8), which promise further transformations in the digital system. 

Journalism, as one of the most important channels producing information, is called upon to employ artificial intelligence technologies in developing its economic, editorial and production models, in a way that guarantees the conversion of information into sustainable economic value. 

Artificial intelligence does not express any “externality” that goes beyond the system of the “information economy” and the “platform economy”, which intensifies the vitality of human communication today and explains its practices and its value-based, psychological and social transformations. Rather, it is part of them, which means that it is part of their transformations today. Therefore, looking at the theoretical and applied frameworks of artificial intelligence as part of this system should fall within what is “thinkable”, as one of the essential solutions in developing the journalistic industry, understood as essentially an economic industry. This will be reflected, in the context of rationalised investment and respect for the profession’s standards and ethics, in the economic, editorial and production systems of media institutions. 

Nor should the information economy be viewed as an isolated technical option, but as a strategic investment that repositions journalism within the state’s macroeconomy. Journalism, as one of the most important channels producing information, is called upon to employ artificial intelligence technologies in developing its economic, editorial and production models, in a way that guarantees the conversion of information into sustainable economic value. 

The integration of these tools can reshape the relationship between information and the market by opening new horizons for smart subscriptions, targeted advertising and audience behaviour analysis, allowing Moroccan journalism to move from the logic of dependence and support to the logic of integration into the knowledge economy. Here, the information economy, supported by artificial intelligence, becomes not merely a technical field but a comprehensive public policy that determines the place of media within the overall economic structure. 

Duality: A Mechanism for Sustaining the Crisis 

Returning to the question of the binaries that characterise the Moroccan political system, tradition/modernity, Sharia/international conventions, and so on, they cannot be viewed as isolated political or intellectual reference points, but rather as mechanisms that are reflected in the structure of journalism’s economic model from several angles: political, economic and legislative. These mechanisms established a duality in the funding mechanisms of journalism, between traditional reliance on the state and public support and connection to authority, and attempts at economic modernisation that did not succeed in consolidating sustainable financial independence. 

In this way, these binaries are not merely an explanatory background, but a structural part of the perpetuation of the crisis. They have kept the economic model of Moroccan newspapers suspended between the logic of dependence and the logic of the market, without settling its position within the information economy or guaranteeing its editorial independence. 

This article was originally published in Arabic on 07/06/2026 

References 

1. Philip Meyer, Yuan Zhang, “Anatomy of a Death Spiral: Newspapers//:and their Credibility,” citeseerx.ist.psu.edu, “accessed Aguste 29, 2025”. https .bit.ly/3BcEzV9 

2. Julia Cagé, Benoit Huet, L’Information est un bien public: Refonder la propriété des médias, Edition Seuil, 2021, p. 144. 

3. It is noticeable that successive governments, especially after the 2011 Constitution, did not attach great importance to media in their public policies; the measures that accompanied newspapers after the health crisis, Covid-19, mainly concerned raising public support. 

4. Ilham El Gaoual, Taib Berkane, “The Media and Societal Transformations in Morocco”, https://rsisinternational.org/journals/ijriss/articles/the-media-and-societal-transformations-in-morocco/ 

5. Abdelrahim Belshqar, Paid Digital Journalism: Challenges of the Economic Model and Requirements for Development, Doha, Al Jazeera Institute, 2021. 

6. Inspiration can be drawn from the experience of the European Media Freedom Act, which established new rules to protect media pluralism and independence in the European Union. These rules guarantee the protection of editorial independence, the protection of journalists’ sources, the strengthening of transparency in media ownership, and transparency in government advertising for media service providers and digital platforms. 

7. For further detail, see the official website of the European Commission: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/new-push-european-democracy/protecting-democracy/european-media-freedom-act_en 

8. Cagé, Huet, L’Information est un bien public: Refonder la propriété des médias, Edition Seuil, 2021, p. 130. 

9. Mustapha Suleman, Michael Bhaskar, The Coming Wive Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2023.