Cape Town is a key centre of the publishing industry in the country and probably its most important. Many of the key leisure magazines are produced here and the city is home to many of the key publishing houses. We also host the prestigious Cape Town Book Fair in the city. The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) territorial report on Cape Town (2008) places the value of Cape Town’s printing and publishing sector (wood and paper related activities) at R4.34 billion.
This makes publishing, at more than double the contribution of the film industry, one of the most lucrative areas of our local creative economy. At the same time, print is under huge pressure from new technologies and, added to this, the global economic meltdown has severely affected the sales of many print publications.
It’s therefore always interesting to see new entrants in the publishing arena – whether in printed or electronic form. Three new ones came to our attention recently. Cape Town is established as the Pink Tourism hub of South Africa, so it should not come as a surprise that a new glossy magazine, Out Africa Magazine, aimed at the “gay and lesbian community” was launched at the Crew Bar in Napier Street recently.
The fact that the invite cover features a serious male beefcake and a sprouting champagne bottle makes us wonder if it’s aimed more at gay men than women, but that is something that has yet to be seen. We look forward to reviewing the magazine soon.
An events listing magazine for Cape Town 021 Magazine is on its second version. It’s a strange mixture of articles together with some useful listings and costs R20 at various outlets. We hope it manages to find an audience, since many similar magazines of this nature have fallen by the wayside in the last few years.
Lastly a free newspaper is planned for release shortly. Hola Capetown is pitched at an international (and young) backpacker audience and 5 000 copies will be distributed at backpackers, language schools, info centres, selected clubs and restaurants, surf shops and adventure tour operators around the city.
If you haven’t had a chance to look at www.mahala.co.za yet, it’s an brilliant, irreverent, insider view on South African pop culture with a separate section on surf and a section called Kif or Kak. Tell us what electronic or print publications you read currently and why.
