Although news about the #FeesMustFall campaign by universities students garnered an 18.79 % of the news, managing director Tonya Khoury said interest was beginning to "diversify", with MTN Nigeria's fine garnering of national news coverage.
As a sports-mad nation, the Rugby World Cup remained an item of high interest with 15.57 % of local media coverage focused on it. The Soweto soccer derby and the Rugby teams the Lions and the Currie Cup also featured.
Some of the smaller news items included the "bacon bombshell" where the popular breakfast meat was reported to cause cancer - a claim vociferously defended against by certain prominent South Africans.
In terms of the more informal channel of communication via social media, the rugby world cup pipped the #FeesMustFall campaign to claiming a proportion of 39.67 % of SA chatter,compared to the protest action garnering 36.56 % of interest.
The #FeesMustFall campaign also made a global impact, taking a 5.91 % proportion of news coverage. However, over half of all stories internationally were about the popular celebration of Halloween.
In contrast, more serious political matters such as the Syrian conflict, and migrant and refugee crisis took just over a seven percent and six percent share respectively. Stories on US presidential hopefuls Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump also proved popular, with Trump taking a 9,63 % of the media coverage, compared to the Israeli-Palestinian violence which obtained under one percent of the share.
The statistics derived by ROi Africa are drawn from 206 million international social networks, 60,000 online global newspaper, thousands of South African and African printed publications and 76 South African radio and TV stations.
Source: News24 via News24Wire
