ATTACK OF THE KILLER NEWSPAPERS!

Abstract

While newspapers in the global North seem to be involved in a struggle for survival, the inverse seems to be happening in South Africa. Since their introduction almost a decade after South Africa became a democracy, a range of new tabloid papers have taken the country by storm. The Daily Sun is now the biggest selling daily newspaper in the country, showing a constant increase since its launch five years ago. The publisher claims that there is even a second-hand market for copies; such is the demand for the paper among those that can barely afford it. Similar success stories are told about the spate of tabloids following in the Daily Sun's wake—Kaapse Son, Cape Sun and Daily Voice. These tabloids speak to a section of the South African public that remain largely out of focus in the mainstream commercial media outlets which, despite far-reaching changes in ownership structures and editorial changes to bring about racial transformation in the media industry after apartheid, are still beholden to those sections of the public conventionally thought to be favoured by advertisers.

Keywords:

• newspapers
• post-apartheid
• South Africa
• tabloids

Notes

1. If her assertion is correct that tabloid narratives are based on oral culture, it could be argued that the South African tabloids tap into an ancient tradition of African storytelling (this already forms the topic of a postgraduate dissertation at the Tshwane University of Technology) (Machelene Joubert, personal communication, 2007). The oral tradition in other forms of media in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance television, has also been noted by Bourgault (1995), p. 140)

2. The Daily Sun at the time of writing had only a masthead on its website with the message “under construction” (www.dailysun.co.za); the Kaapse Son's website (www.dieson.co.za) contains mostly an archive of its page three girls, with a random selection of recent sports stories and video clips; and typing in the URL for the Daily Voice redirects the browser to Independent Newspapers’ general news site, Independent Online (www.iol.co.za). Articles that have appeared in Son can be found in the online archives of Die Burger, its sister newspaper in the Naspers stable, but only via the search engine on Die Burger's website.

3. There have been earlier manifestations of tabloid-type newspapers, like the Afrikaans Dagbreek en Landstem in the 1960s (De Villiers, 1992), and Bantu World, founded in 1932 (see Switzer, 1988), to which the veteran black editor and since 2007 Press Ombudsman Joe Thloloe has compared the Daily Sun for what he saw as its stereotypical portrayal of black people by a paper “owned by white editorial directors who ‘knew’ the Bantu”. He described the Daily Sun as a “patronizing throwback to the Bantu World of the 1950s” (Thloloe, 2004). Although the context in which these tabloids operated was very different from that of the post-apartheid tabloids, the latter example is noteworthy. The relationship between white owners/publishers and black audiences against the background of a big commercial enterprise, as in the case of Bantu World, as well as the articulation of working-class aspirations in terms of the accoutrements of the petty-bourgeoisie (Switzer, 1988, p. 352) is relevant (although not entirely similar) to the current tabloids.

4. The editor of the Cape Town daily tabloid Daily Voice, Karl Brophy, sees the term “mainstream media” apply to tabloids rather than broadsheets: “Given that the Daily Sun is, quite clearly, the biggest selling newspaper in the country and accepting that the Daily Voice is, by far, the biggest selling newspaper in Cape Town how do we (i.e. us and the Daily Sun) not qualify as the ‘mainstream media’? Surely we are the mainstream media and the Cape Times et al. are ‘niche media’” (personal communication, 31 January 2007). In this article I nevertheless prefer to use the term “mainstream press” to refer to broadsheet newspapers, since these media preceded the entry of the tabloids on the market and still dominate the discourse about professional journalism, as was evident from the clash between tabloid editors and other members of the South African National Editors’ Forum, notably at the 2005 Sanef Annual General Meeting in Cape Town (Barrett, 2006). Although the tone of debate at the latter was “exclusionary” (Ferial Haffajee, personal communication, 2007), Sanef issued a statement in which the tabloids were welcomed as a “vibrant part of the changing landscape” (Barrett, 2006, p. 57). My choice to refer to broadsheets as “mainstream” is therefore informed not by circulation figures but the balance of power in journalistic discourse in the country, which might well change over time.

5. The Sowetan has a history of being a well-established paper aimed at “urban-based, relatively affluent African readers” and under apartheid challenged the ruling order (Tomaselli, 2000, p. 378). Other notable mainstream newspapers (albeit sometimes also showing a tabloid influence) aimed at a urban black readership are the Zulu-language papers Isolezwe, Ilanga and UmAfrika. The latter three have shown growth in circulation and revenue over the last few years (Bloom, 2005).

6. The themes outlined here are not exhaustive and are based on an exploratory reading rather than a quantitative content analysis. My reading of the tabloids is also informed by interviews with journalists and focus group interviews with readers of different tabloids in various parts of the country.

7. The Daily Sun's editor is Themba Khumalo, but Du Plessis fulfils most of the executive editorial functions, like convening the daily news conference and deciding on the lead stories, which he often rewrites himself.