Gangster State

but I had a hunch. So I phoned a few of the schools and libraries listed.
They all confirmed my suspicions: that they received copies of the now
defunct The New Age newspaper. ‘We received a small heap of The
New Age newspapers every morning, but nobody really read them,’
said one employee at a municipal library somewhere in the Fezile Dabi
district municipality. ‘They were mostly just left on a heap.’
The document, it would seem, is a blueprint for one of the Guptas’
early coups. The New Age first hit the shelves in December 2010. By
June the following year, it was distributing over 4 000 subscriber
copies a day to those government entities listed in the spreadsheet.
The document shows that more than 1 300 copies of The New Age
were delivered to hundreds of primary schools, high schools and FET
colleges all over the province each morning. Just over 1 000 copies a
day were sent to provincial government departments and
municipalities, of which the Office of the Premier was the single largest
subscriber. A further 1 770 copies a day were delivered to 177 libraries
that fell under the custodianship of the Free State Department of Sport,
Arts, Culture and Recreation.
The New Age never subjected itself to an audit of its circulation
figures by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), so in order to put
these subscription figures into perspective, one has to dig a little deeper
and do a bit of educated guesswork.
Each year, a non-profit organisation called the South African
Audience Research Foundation releases the All Media and Products
Survey (AMPS), which includes detailed information on the public’s
consumption of newspapers. According to the AMPS data for 2011 ,
each issue of The New Age had an average readership figure of 39 000
in the paper’s first year in existence.^11