Mediating an alternative public sphere: Malawian readers attitudes and perceptions towards a tabloid

In December 2013, the Weekend Times, a weekly tabloid newspaper owned by the Blantyre Newspapers Ltd ceased publication. The Weekend Times was Malawi’s first and only tabloid. In its two years of existence, the newspaper enjoyed a faithful following among youthful urban dwelling readers. The paper attempts to understand why these readers enjoyed reading the Weekend Times and the effect the newspaper had in the communicative spaces occupied by the youth. The study uses Habermas’s public sphere theory to examine how the newspaper mediated discussion in the youthful public sphere. Using qualitative data drawn from 98 essays written by university students exploring their perceptions and attitudes towards the Weekend Times, the study employed thematic analysis as a mode of arriving at themes which form the bedrock of the findings. Three main themes are presented here: the mediation role played by the Weekend Times in the youthful alternative public sphere, the sharing of stories among the readers and the ambivalent feelings among the readers arising out of the newspaper’s sexualized content. The paper concludes by noting how the Weekend Times’s major contribution to Malawian journalism and the public sphere was its mediation of an alternative public sphere different from the politicized mainstream press