The Suns – Daily and Sunday – work in the market because they’re so carefully aimed…
They’re designed day after day – and Sunday after Sunday – to appeal to the men and women who now comprise the new Middle South Africa…and nobody else.
They’re the biggest group in the land. They now add up to by far the bulk of the voters in the land AND the majority of money-spending consumers.
That’s where we dominate.
But it’s not by accident.
To demonstrate the point, come trawl with me through some of the page leads in Thursday’s big paper…
P1: DEATH ON THE ROAD TO LOVE…the story of a guy from Kimberley who could not bear to be apart from his beloved in Bloemfontein, so he set out in his little car at 2am last Sunday to visit her. But he crashed and died – “death was waiting on the dark, lonely road…and true love stopped right there…”
P3: HOUSE OF RUBBISH…inside the house of a woman who collects shiny things like a jackdaw but never throws them away…and now lives with rubbish piled from floor to ceiling.
P4: WORKERS STEAL OUR RDPs…of 443 houses promised by the developers, only five have been delivered…sub contractors have not been paid and are now stealing the fittings of half-built houses and selling them to make some money at least…
P5: SHOW US THE MONEY…Sub, sub, sub contractors – workmen three or four times removed from the contractor who originally won the government tender and pocketed the cash – have not been paid. First we reported they beat up a sub, sub contractor – who hadn’t been paid either – and now they’ve walked away from the new hospital they’re supposed to be building. That, right there, is the story of the so-called tenderpreneurs – who get contracts but don’t do the work – and the service delivery crisis that so vexes this government…
P6: That’s our world page. On Thursday it included a man from Missouri who won the lottery TWICE, new hope for the trapped miners in Chile and rich kids being kidnapped in Nigeria…Carefully-aimed stuff as I said…
P7: The Orlando Pirates meet the Moroka Swallows in the Mainstay Cup Finals on Saturday. That has not happened for 30 years. Our editor Themba Khumalo was there in 1980…a wide-eyed kid of 12 years old, delivered to the old Orlando Stadium by his uncle in his blue Valiant, dazzled by the “giants that walked the earth in those far-off days.” Themba reports that it was this story the radio stations most wanted to talk about when they phoned him on Thursday morning. Nostalgia is STILL what it used to be…
P8: NO WATER NO FUTURE…all about pollution killing our source of life…

P9: A story about white people, unusually. This one was about the 72-year-old ex mayor of Heidelberg who was photographed shagging a 26-year-old girl in his office. The alleged blackmailer demanded “R200 000 and your bakkie.” We ran the amazing story with a cartoon by our graphics star, Sizwe Sikhakhane, showing a bare bum through the curtains…and the guy with the camera saying: “Smile please…”
P10: BIG BLAST HITS INDIA…vuvuzelas are taking centre stage at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
P12: Mr Fixit who mends people’s houses every day for free…and Snaparazzi - win R1 000 or more if you’re the unsuspecting one whose picture appears on this page – but you must buy the paper to find out…
Then there’s SunSport…eight pages of soccer which readers can pull out…
Then there’s SunHouses – a free-standing house of your own being the glittering pot at the end of the rainbow…And SunShopper…twelve pages of month-end specials….SunBuzz: all about showbiz, including a page of “stars foretell…”, soapies and even a little lesson in colloquial English.
And the inside back page always carries YOUR VOICE…a page of letters selected by Themba from the hundreds – even thousands – that we get every week.
As I said at the start, as a value proposition, I think this one’s hard to beat…
We’re rocking here!

Regards

Deon du Plessis
SunPublisher