ThisDay breaks SA media mould
11 November 2003
Traditional thinking has it that South African companies expand into Africa, not the other way around. So when Nigerian group ThisDay announced that it was launching a new daily newspaper in South Africa, it created quite a stir in the local business community.
After more than a year of planning, ThisDay newspaper - South Africa's first new mainstream daily since the end of apartheid almost 10 years ago - hit the streets of the country's major cities on October 7.
The Johannesburg-based paper is printed in four cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth - and distributed throughout the country, making it the only nationwide general-interest daily newspaper.
Editorial director John Matisonn told I-Net Bridge that ThisDay would offer South African newspaper readers "a new experience: a quality newspaper, intended to compare with the great newspapers in the world, but with
one difference - it was born and bred on the African continent."
Headed by editor Justice Malala, formerly a Sunday Times correspondent in New York, ThisDay's staff includes some of South Africa's top journalists: former editor and columnist Fred Khumalo; former Top of the Times (part of the Cape Times) editor Sandile Dikeni; Zimbabwe-based journalist Peta Thornycroft; former Business Times editor Kevin Davie; features editor Charlotte Bauer; personal finance editor Heather Formby; and parliamentary editor Angela Quintal, formerly head of the SA Press Association's parliamentary bureau.
Sports writers include sports editor Vuyo Bavuma, Liam del Carme and Peter Robinson.
Wits University journalism professor Anton Harber, writing on the journalism department's website, described the new paper as a "boost to democracy [in South Africa], adding to the diversity of choices available to readers, and a boon to the
profession of journalism."
Harber added that as South Africa's first fully national daily, ThisDay "comes unencumbered by the historical baggage which has weighed down so many of our existing papers; and it is a Nigerian-funded pan-African venture, very much in the spirit of Nepad [the New Partnership for Africa's Development]."
ThisDay chairperson Nduka Obaigbena said ThisDay would stand for truth, freedom, free enterprise, democracy and social justice, adding that he hoped the paper would build new bridges on the continent.
In welcoming the launch of ThisDay, President Thabo Mbeki said it was "always a pleasure to see the arrival of a new newspaper. We hope that this newspaper will give voice to the many people who do not have a voice".
For ThisDay to succeed in South Africa's highly competitive newspaper market will take "huge reservoirs of money, courage and patience," Harber noted.
There are four other mainstream English-language dailies on sale
in Johannesburg, and Durban and Cape Town also have multiple dailies.
And ThisDay is not the only new paper on South Africa's media landscape. The Daily Sun, a down-market daily tabloid launched last year, has seen its sales skyrocket, and the weekly Afrikaans tabloid Kaapse Son, which launched earlier this year, will soon be complemented by its Media24 sister publication Gauteng Son.
ThisDay is out to prove that there is also room for growth at the upper end of South Africa's newspaper market.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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