South African business media, measured rather than described.
South African business media, measured.Everything South African business media publishes, tracked and counted. No single publication can see this, because none of them can see across all the others. These are the numbers that come out when you do.
2026-10-12 to 2026-11-11 · updated 2026-11-11
- 2968items publishedover 18 days, 178 on a median day
- 54publishersfiling under 95 separate feeds
- 0.9%was the same story twice12 of 2242 stories ran in more than one publisher
- 28.9%came from five publishersthe rest is spread across everyone else
Almost nothing here is the same story twice
The assumption about a small media market is that everyone covers the same handful of stories. Over this window that is not what the record shows. Of 2242 distinct stories, only 12 appeared in more than one publisher, which is 0.9% of everything published.
The practical consequence is the uncomfortable one. If you follow two or three publications, you are not getting a slightly narrower version of the picture. You are getting a different, mostly non-overlapping slice of it, and the things you never see are not the things somebody else also reported.
The stories that did travel
- 3 outletsLearn about AI in coding from South Africa’s best software development company
- 2 outletsIEC Reports 15.9 Million Election Participants, As Results Process Continues
- 2 outletsTimePrints – David O’Sullivan reflects on his broadcasting career and why he stepped away
- 2 outletsWeek 2 of Takealot Black November – Here are the best deals
- 2 outletsPolice investigate 14 election-related cases
Who publishes the most
- bizcommunity395
- tldr145
- mybroadband109
- itweb105
- businesstech104
- moneyweb103
- techcentral96
- daily investor90
- daily maverick90
- freight news90
What kind of events they were
- expansion354
- funding and investment275
- deals and disposals111
- regulatory action109
- security incidents96
- leadership changes95
- compliance notices60
- tenders and contracts49
- results39
- restructuring31
Method, and what these numbers are not
Every item that arrives is kept and counted once. Two stories are treated as the same story when their four rarest words match, after removing words common across South African headlines. That is deliberately strict: it catches the same story reported twice and will miss two outlets covering one event in very different words, so 0.9% is a floor rather than a ceiling.
Publishers are counted as mastheads, not feeds. One publisher filing the same article under ten section feeds is one publisher, and counting those as ten would have reported syndication that does not exist. 54.2% of items reached us as a headline and a sentence rather than full text, which limits what can be said about content but not about volume or overlap.
Quote any of this, with a link back. If you want the underlying counts for a specific window or sector, ask and we will send them. See also the sector briefings built from the same tracking.
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