South Africa: Case studies examine community newspaper successes

Posted by Maddie Hanna on July 7, 2006 at 10:59 AM

The Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership just released six case studies of successful South African community newspapers, examining the challenges they face and what business and editorial strategies they adopted to surmount those challenges.

The conclusion outlines several strategies to improve editorial content:

Keep a local focus. Be relevant to your community.

Publish letters from readers. Don’t dismiss their topics as unimportant.

Use local journalists, not wire services.

Do not sensationalize editorial content.

The papers featured in the studies are the KZN Community Newspaper, the Southern and Soweto Globe, the Eastern Free State Issue, the Limpopo Mirror, the Ikhwezi News and the North Coast Courier.

The South African community media sector is still emerging from the “struggle era,” the report explains, when it was used as “a tool to counter state propaganda, inform, mobilise, and educate the masses about their rights and to facilitate the building of strong community organisations.” The country’s transition to democracy has given community media a chance to redefine their role.

The PDF of the full report can be downloaded here.

Source: Southern African Media Trainers Network (through Ifra Executive News Service)

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