Arena Holdings will fold the Financial Mail magazine into its daily newspaper, Business Day, from November, creating a single, more powerful daily business and investor publication.
Business Day inherits more than six decades of The Financial Mail’s expertise in long-form analysis and deep reporting. The move simplifies Arena’s product offering, reduces duplication of editorial resources and potentially offers a clearer proposition for advertising and subscription initiatives.
The Financial Mail came to be under Arena Holdings in 2019 when Lebashe Investment Group launched the company, which now houses all its media assets bought from Tiso Blackstar for R1.05bn. Arena’s other media assets include Sowetan, Daily Dispatch, The Herald, Business Day TV and Vuma FM.
This week, Arena Holdings group CEO Pule Molebeledi told staff that the last edition of the magazine, in its current form, would be at end-October. The timing follows industry pressures in which print pools are smaller, digital attention is fragmented, and platforms have siphoned value from legacy publishers.
Molebeledi said the reorganisation would be good for Business Day as it strengthened that publication’s reporting capability without losing expertise from the FM.
“Our readers’ needs are evolving, and so too must the way we deliver our journalism. To ensure we continue offering the highest-quality financial and business analysis, we are strengthening Business Day’s daily coverage with the integration of the Financial Mail’s expertise into the newsroom,” he said.
Molebeledi said this meant “our audience will now enjoy the same in-depth, thought-provoking financial analysis daily through Business Day”.
The move would not result in job losses, he said.
“All permanent and fixed-term staff currently working on Financial Mail will transition into roles within our business titles, where their skills, creativity, and dedication will be critical to our enhanced offering.”
Arena’s decision comes while several local media houses have announced retrenchments to cope with the loss of advertising revenue and troubles replacing print circulation revenue, particularly for legacy businesses, in recent years.
Associated Media Publishing, which ran titles such as Cosmopolitan, shut its doors in 2020, while Media24 closed the print editions of five newspapers, transitioning three of them into digital-only brands and putting hundreds of jobs on the line in 2024.
Daily Maverick announced in September last year it would begin a cost-reduction exercise, aiming to cut about 15% of operating costs. In the same month, Independent Media — owner of publications such as The Star, Cape Times and Isolezwe — announced retrenchments, citing essentially the same reasons as Daily Maverick about an unsustainable media industry.
Much of this has been attributed to the shift in the consumption of digital news sources due to smartphones and more affordable access to the internet.
In early 2025 the Competition Commission recommended that Google should compensate local ailing traditional media houses, whose revenues have dried up over the past decade due to the rise of technology platforms and shifting consumer behaviour, with R300m-R500m annually for three to five years.
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