Glance right and left as you approach the Grasmere tollgate on the N1 highway heading south for Bloemfontein. At left: a bare rocky hill. At right, a legoland of pondokkie homes thrown together from corrugated sheeting, wood and plastic. mCoocoos (cocoons), they call these fast-built but sturdy shacks. The informal settlement is pulsing with taxi business and dusted with the golden hopes of the hundreds of thousands massing freely around the cities of the new South Africa.
Drive off the tar down those rutted streets. Vegetable sellers sit under flapping plastic canopies, protecting precious tomatoes from the sun’s heat. Asifuna! one shouts, jokingly (‘You want something?”) as your 4X4 crunches to a halt with all the style such Sandton shopping trolleys can manage so far from home and safety. Step out from the aircon into the smell of burnt mealie-meal, the clangour of kwaito tunes. Soccer games erupt from straight-as-a-die avenues where Eskom power and municipal sewage are laid on as site & service schemes for the newly arrived settlers.
One settler, one toilet. Take a look at the new tabloids newspapers that live and breathe the life of the mass communities. The Daily Sun and daily Isolezwe, and the weekly Laduma and Sunday World, offer a picture of South Africa far removed from the sober assessments of middle-of-the-road newspapers.
The marketing pitch for the tabloid Daily Sun says the ‘value trends” of the new urban communities include living for today, violence and aggression, sensation seeking, liberal sex attitudes, and the use of stimulants. Heavens! what a shocking litany of social pathologies. And yet the inhabitants of this frightening social milieu rate certain virtues highly, according to the Daily Sun’s sales pitch. They reject authority, seek self-improvement, want physical health, and hope for novelty and change.
The Daily Sun, launched in 2002, has surged to a readership of 1.7 million and is the direct competitor of the long-established tabloid, the Sowetan, whose readership is around 1.9 million. Interesting is that the Daily Sun was already selling more copies than Sowetan in 2003, for according to ABC circulation figures January-June of that year, Daily Sun sold 177,900 and Sowetan 142,852 per day. This can only mean that Sowetan has more readers per copy (rpc’s) – papers are passed around from hand to hand. This is a problematic point for marketers, who have yet to convince all advertising agencies that rpc’s are more significant than audited sales figures.
Quibbles aside, the two new tabloid dailies – Daily Sun and Isolezwe (the Zulu paper of the Independent group’s KwaZulu-Natal division) – have brought welcome boosts in readership. While readership in the dailies market is rising, it is far outpaced by increases in the readership of weeklies, and much of the daily increase is attributable to the emergence of ‘new” readers of the popular tabloids. Deon du Plessis, publisher of the Daily Sun, has said that his newspaper created a pool of more than one million new newspaper readers in less than a year. The survey figures bear him out, and the trend is continuing.
Transformation in South Africa’s newspaper sector is under way with the development of a new market among new readers. The fact that many are new readers is shown by the graphs [see panel] where the absolute numbers of readers has grown for all dailies and weeklies by millions. It is a credit to entrepreneurial spirits in companies like Naspers, Independent Newspapers and Nail that they spotted the gap in the market and went for it. Laduma and Kickoff, meanwhile, the soccer publications, were true start-up ventures.
This business-driven transformation – a true innovation in SA publishing – has not been accorded the recognition it deserves, perhaps because attention has been focused on editorial issues. The Hefer Commission and the plagiarism debates have whipped up strong feelings about journalistic professionalism. Meanwhile, imaginative editors and business strategists have got on with the job of staking out new terrain for the press.
The launch of ThisDay, a national broadsheet newspaper, in October 2003 may or may not add to the overall pool of readers – we shall have to wait until the AMPS survey reveals its readership – but it is unlikely to affect the tabloids because its competitors are the established broadsheets. Research by ThisDay‘s marketers found that hundreds of thousands of readers in South Africa were not satisfied with the existing press, and they said this accounted for a ten-year trend downwards in circulation of the traditional titles.
So you stand in the hot sun, exchanging banter with curious passers-by and paging through a copy of the Daily Sun in the environment where its seemingly trashy formula suddenly make a lot more sense. Councillor on sex rap. I’LL STRANGLE THEM! (3 in court after death of mother and daughter).
In common with tabloid journalism everywhere, these newspapers speak as ‘visual radio” and identify strongly with core human values like motherhood and putu. On all other subjects they express profound disrespect for nearly every office-bearer and institution in the land (including sex pest priests and bumbling soccer bureaucrats).
A cock crows, triumphantly. These are Thabo’s people – or at least, if the president himself seems remote and more concerned with the black bourgeoisie (the ‘blackwazie”) than the peri-urban proletariat – they are the people the ANC is targeting with its electioneering slogans that promise public works job creation and all good things for the future. As Mbeki himself wrote in his first Letter from the President of 2004, ‘we commit ourselves to do everything possible to push back the frontiers of poverty and expand access to a better life for all”.
There is an interesting paradox here, one that goes to the heart of our media system. Is press populism a powerful tool of democracy? These papers make no bones about avoiding political overload. They would rather pile on the entertainment than get serious about the issues of the day. And yet – here’s the puzzle – their readers are directly and personally concerned with all the problems of our politics, which are also the problems of poverty: unemployment, crime, Aids, child abuse, rape, drugs, schooling, corruption and exploitation. The people living off to the side of the N1 near Grasmere know all about what it’s like to be at the bottom of the social pile, and they are bound to cast their votes with redress in mind.
If they vote. Many observers expect an election boycott this time around. Lacking a political home outside the ANC, the masses are restive because toilets and power points alone do not add up to the ‘winning and humane society” Mbeki has promised them. There is skepticism of the claim that the ANC will deliver. No matter how determined the leadership is to empower the people, a poor rate of economic growth is not transforming the lives of the majority, or not enough.
The popular tabloids mirror reality – but they do not reflect on it. They are not common carriers of news and views like the public forum newspapers we are used to. They carry quite a lot of educational material, but they don’t debate the state of the nation, they tell stories. This is both the source of their mass appeal and the reason why press pundits are so often inclined to dismiss the tabloids as largely irrelevant in politics – except perhaps at the level of local scandals where stories carry a sting.
Popular tabloids have brought a new lease of life to newspaper journalism, particularly in the daily sphere where most established papers are barely holding their own or are losing readers. On the weekly scene, strong growth has been experienced by most newspapers but the strongest of all comes from the tabloids.
It mistaken to think that the tabloids appeal only, or even mainly, to the poorest of the poor. The AMPS figures as well as other available research indicates that those who buy tabloid newspapers are in the LSM 5-7 group. This puts them just below mainstream suburbanites, and indeed they are becoming mainstream suburbanites as the site-and-service settlements turn into conventional residential areas.
An interesting sidelight on this residential trend comes from the Alternative Consultancy, a pioneer in marketing to black consumers. Their ConsumerWatch and TradeWatch studies, conducted in 2002 amongst 200 LSM 5-7 households and 100 traders in Gauteng townships, showed that most consumers on low incomes now buy their groceries from township stores. This is a marked reversal of behaviour. In the past, black consumers bought from ‘white” supermarkets for reasons of status and because the product lines were fuller.
It goes to show that the tabloid press is a highly appropriate shop window for fast moving consumer goods and whiteware – fridges, stoves – as well as electronic gadgets. Marketers are listening and looking. Just when everyone thought the press was in decline, a new form of newspapering has made its appearance.
Look into a tabloid and you may not see yourself – it’s a non-reflective mirror – but it will flash a message of mass aspiration and, yes, anger.