Sowetan

What is the Sowetan?

The Sowetan is a Johannesburg-based daily newspaper published by Arena Holdings, with its digital edition published under the SowetanLIVE masthead.^[3] Arena lists Sowetan among its print titles and SowetanLIVE among its online platforms, alongside the Sunday Times, Business Day, the Financial Mail, The Herald and the Daily Dispatch.^[3]

Its origin is documented in contemporaneous wire copy. United Press International reported on 2 February 1981 that “a new black daily newspaper, The Sowetan, appeared Monday”, owned by the Argus newspaper group, upgraded from what had been a weekly advertising handout, and emerging with “the same owners, staff, offices and layout as the defunct Posts” — the Post Transvaal and its Sunday sister, which the government had forced to close.^[1]

Ownership moved to its present holder in 2019, when Arena Holdings acquired Sowetan and SowetanLIVE together with the Sunday Times, TimesLIVE, Business Day, BusinessLIVE, The Herald, the Daily Dispatch, the Financial Mail and Business Day TV from Tiso Blackstar Group for R1.05-billion, a transaction approved by the Competition Tribunal in September 2019 and announced in November 2019.^[2]

What does the Sowetan cover?

The Sowetan is a general daily with a sports desk rather than a sports paper, and football is the principal strand of its sports reporting, matching the composition of its readership. It publishes in print and through the SowetanLIVE digital edition, which Arena runs as a separate site from TimesLIVE within the same group.^[3]

Its sports coverage sits within a portfolio that gives the same publisher two distinct national sports desks: Sowetan's, addressed to a daily readership, and the Sunday Times', addressed to a weekend one.^[3][2] No breakdown of Sowetan's editorial staffing by section could be retrieved.

How large is the Sowetan's audience?

Print circulation is certified by the Audit Bureau of Circulations of South Africa, a non-profit company constituted under an agreement between advertisers, agencies and media owners whose stated function is “the certification and provision of accurate and comparable circulation figures”, with random check audits of members' submissions.^[5] ABC figures for the fourth quarter of 2023, as reported by Daily Investor in February 2024, put Sowetan at 17 873 copies, a decline of 28 per cent year on year.^[4] No more recent audited circulation figure for the title could be retrieved.

Online, the Publisher Research Council publishes readings from Narratiive, the measurement currency contracted to IAB South Africa. SowetanLIVE is recorded at 13.6 million page views and 3.4 million unique browsers in March 2021, and 11.6 million page views and 3.0 million unique browsers in June 2021; the most recent month on the Council's report page is April 2022, in which SowetanLIVE does not appear among the top ten sites listed.^[6]

Both series are several years old, and no figure separating the title's sports readership from its total readership could be retrieved.

Since when has the Sowetan existed?

The founding date is 2 February 1981, the Monday on which the daily first appeared under the Argus newspaper group, having been upgraded from a weekly.^[1] The same UPI report records the continuity of staff, offices and layout with the closed Post Transvaal, which is a matter of succession rather than of founding: the Sowetan was a new title, not a renamed one.^[1]

The change of publisher is separately dated. Arena Holdings' acquisition of the title from Tiso Blackstar Group was approved by the Competition Tribunal in September 2019 and completed and announced in November 2019.^[2] The masthead did not change at that point; the digital edition continues under the SowetanLIVE name and the title's own domain now resolves to sowetan.co.za.^[3]

Why does the Sowetan matter in South Africa's sport?

A daily football desk has been addressed to its readership since 1981.^[1] Where broadcast coverage of the domestic professional football competitions sits with a rights holder, daily newspaper reporting on those competitions does not, which makes a general daily a separate kind of source on the same events.

Its current scale has to be stated with its dates. The most recent certified circulation figure retrieved is 17 873 copies for the fourth quarter of 2023, within an ABC member-wide decline of 7.4 per cent year on year and a fall in ABC membership from 448 publications in 2022 to 403.^[4][5] The most recent online readings retrieved are from 2021.^[6]

Arena has continued to publish the title in both print and digital form through a period in which several competing South African dailies ended their print editions.^[3]