The Voice was the first daily tabloid in the Western Cape. Die Son launched two weeks later.

In any case, being first to market is no real advantage in newspapers. The Daily Mirror in the UK peaked at more than 5.5 million sales a day under Hugh Cudlipp. The Daily Express was selling 3.8 million copies a day around about the same time. Then Rupert Murdoch launched The Sun in the 1970s. It took only a matter of years for the ‘Soaraway Sun’ to become the biggest selling daily in the country. The Mirror has been in constant decline since and now sells in the region of 1.5 million a day while the Express is a joke of a paper that barely manages 750,000.

The Sun has slipped somewhat from its peaks of in excess of 4 million but still sells more than 3 million copies.

The newspapers that professors and media commentators love to love like the Guardian and the Times both lose huge amounts of money. As Paul Dacre recently pointed out, the Times is subsidised by The Sun and the News of the World while the Guardian is subsidised by Auto Trader magazine (a fact that the Guardian’s anti-captialist lefties like to forget).

The point of this is that newspapers cannot be editorially independent unless they are financially independent.

People seem to get excited about crazy schemes like ThisDay and Nova as well as charity newspapers like The Times in South Africa when they launch and then bemoan the stupidity of the market for not wanting them when they, inevitably, close shorlty afterwards in mass teeth gnashing and reciminations. It’s akin to sailors complaining about the sea or, even worse, politicians blaming the electorate for their poor performances.