ftm Media Sleuth

One May Not Think Of Africa When Looking For Thriving Newspaper Markets, But Then One Would Make A Big Mistake By Neglecting South Africa

Philip M. Stone September 28, 2006

The headlines about newspaper success coming out of South Africa recently are enough to make grown publishers in the US and Europe cry. The Sunday Sun, for instance, merely five years old, just announced its latest audited figures showing sales up by 10% over the same three month period last year, and its 195,850 circulation now leads Sundays by 17,000 over its next competitor.
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The racy tabloid Daily Sun is up by 4% for an average daily sale of 463,691.  Launched three years ago, it has a daily readership of some 3.6 million, more than any other newspaper in the country.

Media24, publisher of both titles, says that one key to success is through distribution – getting the newspapers to those areas where other newspapers had not really penetrated, and had not cared about that much because of poor earning power of those readers. That’s how The Sunday Sun, the fastest growing newspaper in the country, was able to achieve sales of more than 100,000 just five months after its launch. Its current readership is estimated at 1,930,000.

The ftm Media Sleuth in South Africa reports that the mainstream newspapers counter the success of the Sun titles by pointing out that what really counts for advertisers is the buying power of the reader, and not necessarily how many readers there are for a particular publication. 

For instance, the buying power of the Sunday Times readers is thought to be about double that of the Sunday Sun readers, “and for advertisers that is all that matters,” says our correspondent.

And it’s not just the English language media that is doing well. Isolezwe, a Zulu language daily tabloid based in Durban, with a circulation close to 100,000, has seen its readership climb to 644,000 a day, the highest of any Zulu-language newspaper, according to the All Media and Products (AMPS) survey. The paper is only four years old and has drawn a 41% readership by women.

Our ftm Media Sleuth reports the AMPS survey provided other key findings about the South Africa media scene:

• Radio remains the most popular media, followed closely by television.
• There is a significant increase in the number of people who now read newspapers, no doubt thanks to the success of the various Sun titles.
• Most daily newspapers have increased readership, with the exception of those in the Western Cape.
• Ownership of DVD players and digital cameras have increased, but video recorder (VCR) ownership has declined.
• There has been a 22% decrease in the number of households that use a fixed-line telephone access, but nearly 50% of the population now has a cell phone.

South Africa’s print and broadcast news media operate without interference or pre-publication censorship, but that right is being threatened by new proposed legislation that the country’s National Editors Forum and the Freedom of Expression Institute are opposing.

The problem comes from an attempt to rewrite the current Film and Publications Act that now specifically exempts print and broadcast media from censorship rules. An amendment to that law is being proposed to Parliament that will end the exemption, subjecting the media to the likes and dislikes of the country’s Film and Publications Board (FPB).

Part of the proposed amendment reads that the FPB reviews content for “descriptions or representations of or amounting to sexual material; propaganda for war, incitement to imminent violence or the advocacy of hatred based on any identifiable group characteristic.” All rather vague, and given the Sun titles emphasis on sex coverage it could well put a crimp in their style.

The amendment comes as more and more South African politicians are taking a swipe at the media, blaming it, rather than government policies, for most of the ills in the country. For instance, embattled health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recently sidelined as the government’s chief spokesperson on its HIV/AIDS strategy, blames the media for her downfall.

She says the media concentrated too much on her commitment to garlic, beetroot, olive oil, and lemon remedy for boosting health, but she says she never suggested that good nutrition was an alternative to antiretroviral treatments.

South Africa’s Rhodes University has just hosted the 10th annual Highway Africa Conference  -- the largest such gathering of African journalists. Some 500 delegates from across the continent assessed the state of African media, especially on how they can make use of new technologies. As a sign of how the continent is moving to guarantee freedom of the press the African Editors Forum issued a communiqué condemning media harassment in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Gambia.

Another sign of South Africa’s emerging newspaper presence – the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) holds its 2007 conference in Cape Town next June.