SECTOR 2 company within the Primedia radio stable, has developed into a fully-fledged online news site. Currently there are no online African language newspapers. However, since October 2012, UCT journalism lecturer Unathi Kondile decided to tweet only in isiXhosa in a fight to mainstream African languages, and to encourage micro blogging and the sharing of information in people’s home languages. “The level of conversation in indigenous languages across social networks, dealing with conceptual issues and news, is incredible. Apart from Unathi, there are many others who are helping to revive African languages and news reporting. Ordinary young people are using Blackberry Messenger (BBM), Facebook, Mxit and Twitter to create small stories from their areas, some of which go viral and are picked up by the mainstream media. Social media is proving to be a very powerful tool.” The print versions of daily and weekly newspapers are mostly available in the country’s big cities, and most are published in English. An initiative to encourage the growth of both vernacular language and English literacy is the Nal’ibali bilingual newspaper supplements, which are published in English and isiZulu, or English and isiXhosa, depending on the area of distribution. These supplements are inserted in The Times (KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Western Cape), the Herald and the Daily Dispatch (Eastern Cape), while almost a million of these supplements are distributed directly to reading clubs, community organisations, libraries and schools. Nal’ibali means ‘here’s the story’ in isiXhosa and it includes stories, literacy activities and reading club tips and support. “The newspaper market has been hit hard by declining circulation. Cover prices have had to increase but newsrooms are being decimated as management seeks to cut costs, meaning that fewer people have to do more work. As a result the quality of newspaper content is clearly dropping too.” As a result of cost cutting, the Sunday Times withdrew its Zulu edition, the Express, in April 2013. As a means of saving money, some newspaper houses have looked at sharing resources. The Independent Group, for example, began using a national pool of sub-editors for all its publications in 2011. By 2013, this pool had shrunk. Rapport and Beeld are investigating combining their newsrooms to save on costs. There are 28 weekly newspapers, two up from 2010 and the magazine market has shrunk in 2010 from 655 to 600. The number of community/local newspapers and magazines, however, has grown in the past three years from 470 to 480. Government distributes money generated from the state and through the contributions of media houses to support the media through, the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), which falls under the Office of the Presidency. Panellists were aware that many community radio and television stations received financial support to get studios up and running and to pay for programme production, but how the MDDA supports print publications was not clear. 32 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER SOUTH AFRICA 2013