Fascinating post from Anton Harber on crime reporting in South Africa and the different agendas/perspectives of two newspapers. I hope he won’t mind if I repeat it all:

Two newspapers in the same building do the same crime story. The result: two versions so different that there is almost nothing – not even their photographs of the same woman – which would have us link them together.

The Beeld headlines screams across the front page: “Veilig na kattebak-hel (Safe after hell in car boot [trunk]).”

A middle-aged white woman, photographed with her relieved husband, tells how she was hijacked, driven around for 52 hours in her own car boot, before being let free in a township with her kidnappers saying, “Don’t wake anyone, they will think you are a thief … wait till it gets light.” She crept into an outside toilet where an “old black lady” found her.

The Daily Sun headline reads: “Help! There a white ghost in my toilet.” It is the same story, this time told from the viewpoint of the old lady who found the kidnap victim in her outhouse. “The gogo walked casually to her outside toilet in the middle of the night,” the intro reads.

“And she found a pale ghost sitting on the seat! But it wasn’t a ghost. It was the (mlungu) game lodge manager Hennielel Botha, who had just be released by cruel hijackers!”

These are sister newspapers, produced from the same building in Auckland Park, Johannesburg.

The first is a leading, Afrikaans middle-class paper with an obsession with crime. Day after day, Beeld leads with a headline screaming about a crime case targeting their demographic. The woman who found the lady in the toilet is minor in their story, not even meriting a name.

The other paper is a tabloid aimed at the black working class.

The Daily Sun was launched in 2002. It changed the South African newspaper market.

“Our research shows most Daily Sun readers had never bought a newspaper before the paper was launched,” said Steve Pacak, chief financial officer at media firm Naspers, which publishes South Africa’s first full-blown tabloid.

Daily Sun hit newsstands three years ago [2002] and is now the country’s top-selling daily, shifting more than 400,000 copies a day with a solid diet of sex, sensation and sangomas – the local word for a traditional healer. [SMH, 2005]