Sports Illustrated goes Afrikaans

With the significant growth in the Afrikaans magazine market, Sports Illustrated's research shows that Afrikaans sports fans are hungry for a magazine that entertains and informs them in their own language. Sports Illustrated Afrikaanse Uitgawe aims to attract new Afrikaans readers to Sports Illustrated, as well as provide current Afrikaans readers with a cutting-edge, multi-sport publication in their mother tongue.

The magazine will be headed up by Sports Illustrated's new associate editor, Pieter Redelinghuys. Redelinghuys joins the team from another Media24 publication, Die Burger newspaper, where he was the sports editor.

"The new magazine is really going to surprise and excite Afrikaans sports fans," says Pieter. "Rather being just a translation of Sports Illustrated, we will rework stories into the truly descriptive and colourful language that Afrikaans is. We're also going write new features and smaller articles specifically for the Afrikaanse Uitgawe with a stronger focus on rugby."

Publisher Andrew Gillett comments, "We want to invest in the future of our magazine and, by offering Afrikaans sports fans the best multi-sports magazine in the country in their own language, we aim to grow our existing Afrikaans readership considerably. Obviously, we'll be significantly increasing our print order to match this anticipated growth, but critically, this will come at no additional cost to our advertisers - one rate will qualify advertisers for both publications. We just require advertising material to be supplied in both languages."

So what else will change? Gillett concludes, "Given the nature of our license agreement with Sports Illustrated in the US, we will retain the strongly recognisable Sports Illustrated logo, but will add Afrikaanse Uitgawe to the masthead and will use a combination of colours and cover lines to differentiate it from the English version." The payoff line is "Lees beter. Weet beter."