CRASH! Boom! Bang! Frighten the horses! Cause persons of a delicate disposition to scream!
So what’s this then?
A bird? A plane?
No! It’s Daily Sun, the biggest-selling daily in South African history.
The latest All Media and Products Survey figures show our noisy two-year-old is read daily by more or less the same number of people as read ALL the dailies in the Independent Newspaper Group COMBINED!
Good grief! Something is stirring! What’s going ON here?
Well, here’s the big thing.
Newspapers, some of which were in danger of becoming confidential bulletins, needed a re-think.
The general proposition was that dailies aimed at the higher end of (white) suburban society. That is where the money used to be and generally those papers were run by Chaps who pissed it up at the old Rand Club. Many dailies did their appointed task very well. We have reason to be grateful. They kept a flag flying when apartheid madness afflicted so many of us.
Also there is nothing wrong with the (white) upper end of suburban society. It is a very good corner of the market.
But it is not The market.
And therein lay the trap. What some people thought was the whole South African world actually turned out to be only one small corner.
There were other small corners too (and some not so small), particularly after the elections of 1994 broke up the stale, old logjam.
Suburban, general-interest dailies were of no interest or relevance in interesting new markets that were clearly forming. Because there were a lot of those suburban, general-interest dailies did not mean the market was saturated. It only meant that corner of the market was full.
What also vanished like mist in the sun was the old view of the so-called black market. What quickly became clear after 1994 (if one still insisted on racial definitions) was that there were many markets among black people (even a Rand Club one!). That was as it should be. With apartheid’s dead hand no longer clogging up the national arteries life could begin to flow again. Markets would rule, not politics. Thank the great spirits for that!
So Daily Sun picked its market corner — the skilled blue-collar guy and his lady, living in townships, who were On Their Way: potentially, some day, the next, great middle class.
They owned their houses now, they had cellphones, they had an increasing disposable income, their kids were learning stuff at last, they were starting to eat out … even thinking about going on holidays. A whole revolution was going on there.
Daily Sun, even before the start, knew the paper had to be a rifle shot into this market, not a the sort of shotgun blast that many competitors fired off every day. They hoped to catch bits of many kinds of people in a veritable hail of pellets, high and low.
Daily Sun prepared ONE bullet for ONE corner of the market.
It mattered only that we hit the target. If other market areas did not like it, who cared?
So we carefully explored what kind of people lived in our chosen corner of the market. What did they need, what revved their engines?
And we put together a paper for them. Not for anyone else. For them.
And that’s the clue behind the hand-wringing over Daily Sun‘s coverage of the dreadful events in Emdeni Extension this week. [The Daily Sun‘s decision to name a mother alleged to have brutally murdered her “possessed” child was criticised this week as was its decision to show a photograph of the child’s body.]
Two facts are relevant here:
Firstly, the paper’s circulation this week hit new records — pretty close to 400 000 a day. That means the rifle shot found its mark in the intended target. Good. And the reaction there has been sympathy for the butchered baby and outrage that such a thing could happen. They are not angry with Daily Sun: they appreciate that THEIR paper brought these evil events to their attention. They are engaged, they are involved, Daily Sun has relevance in THEIR lives.
And secondly, without exception, the people who complain and wring their hands are not our target audience. They are different kinds of people altogether. To stretch an analogy, they are judging a house in Randburg by the standards of Versailles. There is nothing wrong with Randburg, there is nothing wrong with Versailles. But they are different things. They do different jobs.
I do not care if those from another world do not like our paper. We are doing our job in another neck of the woods altogether.
And here is some unsolicited advice: rather than complain about us, DO NOT BUY THE PAPER! One of the great joys of the revolution of 1994 is that South Africans have a choice now.
Exercise your new rights, buy one of the other excellent products on the market.
And for Heaven’s sake: South Africans with other, certainly tougher, life experiences are very different from you.
Deon du Plessis is the publisher and co-owner of Daily Sun