South Africa Communiqué
23 July 2010
The New Age hits the print market

A new daily publication The New Age was launched on 22 June 2010 in Johannesburg. Former minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad said, the paper will be critical but constructive, it will gather reports and news from the nine (9) provinces of the country which most newspapers don’t do. Adding that the newspaper will cover the good stories coming out of provinces that had been painted by the media as having no stability and lack of service delivery.

It will be a 32-page newspaper broadsheet with an initial daily print of 170 000 copies, sold at R3.50 starting mid-September 2010 and will seek to tell the story of South Africa from an angle of a “half-full-glass” than “half-empty” - as other publications currently do, said the newspaper editor, Vuyo Mvoko.

Bennett Colemen &Co Ltd will publish the paper, which also publishes The Times of India, funded by the Gupta Group which has close links to the ruling party African National Congress (ANC).

BACKGROUND

African National Congress (ANC) is set to have its own newspaper which is set to go public in September 2010. The publication will be funded by the Gupta Group which is closely linked to the party president Jacob Zuma and the ANC.

The newspaper will be called the New Age, and will be published daily. Essop Pahad whose magazine is also bankrolled by the Guptas, is one of the people behind the newspaper and former Business Day journalist Vuyo Mvoko is expected as editor of the paper.

Meanwhile Pahad covered up for ANC by saying the newspaper  “is not and will not be affiliated to the ANC”. However the ANC has made no secrete of its dissatisfaction with the media and its belief that media companies are unfairly critical of it. At its Polokwane conference in 2007 it emerged that an ANC-aligned newspaper was needed, but the biggest obstacle has been to find a financier.

The New Age will target the middle top end of the market and will be based in Gauteng. The newspaper is described as “sympathetic” to the party in the media circles. Media analyst Anton Harber, said the newspaper would be a “healthy addition to the mix of voices” but that it was important that “they are clear and open about where they are coming from”. He said there was a need to ensure that government departments did not favour the new publication when it came to recruitment advertising, which he said “would be illegal”.

Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) spokesman Pratrick Craven welcomed the competition, saying the labour federation had always felt that “print media were owned by too few companies”.

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