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Type | Daily newspaper |
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Format | Tabloid |
Owner(s) | Arena Holdings |
Founded | 2 February 1981 |
Language | English |
Headquarters | Johannesburg |
Website | www |
The Sowetan is an English-language South African daily newspaper that started in 1981 as a liberation struggle newspaper and was freely distributed to households in the then apartheid-segregated township of Soweto, Johannesburg, Gauteng Province.
It is one of the largest national newspapers in South Africa. Regarded as having a left-leaning editorial tone, it carried a readership of almost 2 million and a circulation of 124,000 in 2006.[1]
The newspaper is the property of a South African media company Arena Holdings (formerly Tiso Blackstar Group, Avusa, and Times Media Group). Before that, it belonged to Dr. Nthato Motlana (1925–30 November 2008), a prominent South African businessman, physician and anti-apartheid activist, who took a leading role in the formation of the New African Investments Limited (NAIL), which purchased The Sowetan following the apartheid.[2]