Impact of Covid 19 on Media Sustainability https://zimbabwe.misa.org Measurement Print Actual published freely available data is scarce. Nonetheless, the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on Print is discernable in figures provided by South Africa’s Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) on newspapers in the region that submit circulation figures for auditing. Most South African newspapers submit figures to the ABC – so it was a shock when not a single daily or weekly newspaper, along with several notable magazine titles, such as the Financial Mail, Noseweek and Popular Mechanics, submitted any figures for the second quarter, which included a particularly bleak April thanks to the strict lockdown. The ABC allowed publishers to do this “… if their circulation has been materially impacted by the crisis.”72 Table 1 shows the figures for daily newspapers outside South Africa in the second quarter of 2020, designated Q2, covering the three months April, May and June, when lockdowns were in generally in effect, and the percentage change compared to the first quarter when lockdowns were not in full force if at all, and compared to the second quarter of 2019, long before the Covid-19 pandemic. The table shows losses for almost every newspaper except for Bukedde, both compared to the first quarter of the year and compared to the previous comparable period, the second quarter of 2019. Table two shows even big losses for Botswana weekly newspapers and the Lesotho Times..Table 2: 72. Herman Manson, “#CircData: ABC Q2 2020 Plagued by Non-Submissions •,” MarkLives.Com (blog), August 13, 2020, https://www. marklives.com/2020/08/circdata-abc-q2-2020-plagued-by-non-submissions/. 18