Today there are many survivors of that era visible in Kimberley - but only one newspaper survived, the Diamond Fields Advertiser, or as the readers affectionately refer to it . . . 'our DFA'.

Over the past ten years the DFA has grown and evolved with the new South Africa. With its relatively young management team and newsroom, circulation and readership have increased every year since we relaunched the dowdy old lady of the Diamond Fields in 1995.

If the truth were told everybody reads us in Kimberley.

So, you might ask, how do we do this, is it because we are the only newspaper available? No, the people of Kimberley and the Northern Cape face an embarrassing surfeit of choice every time they step outside their front door with all the big national newspapers arriving from Johannesburg within an hour of our hitting the streets.

To further spice up the competition there is the Afrikaans daily, Die Volksblad, published down the road in Bloemfontein which hits the streets at the same time as we do. Interestingly though, a major percentage of our readers speak Afrikaans as their first language.

We outsell every newspaper that comes to Kimberley, in fact we outsell the whole lot put together.

We do it by being passionate about the city and the Province we serve, by providing top class local stories and pictures about the people who live here.

We give our readers stories from the people about the people.

We blending these with a package of the best news and pictures from our sister newspapers in the Independent Group.

This combination of local, national, international and sports news gives our readers what we call a 'complete package'. Simply put: If you buy the DFA there is no reason to buy another newspaper.

We champion local issues, but most importantly we provide a forum for our readers (and that is almost half of the newspaper reading population of Kimberley any weekday between Monday and Friday) to have their say, to stand up and be counted.

And, in keeping with the hurly burly of the original diamond diggings which spawned us, we are not afraid to speak our minds or speak up for the voiceless or the intimidated. We are brash, sometimes impulsive and provocative, but more often than not we are spot on and we never lose sight of our raison d'être - the people of Kimberley and the Northern Cape whom we will continue to serve.

So you might ask what is our vision? Our vision is to have our newspaper in every home in Kimberley to start with.

Our vision is to be recognised, once again, as the 'Sandhurst of South African journalism', to be counted among the top five daily newspapers in this country on our own merits, not just the best in our own special category.

In the past few years we have taken giant steps towards achieving this. The DFA has won several Vodacom Journalists of the Year Awards and received several Mondi Paper Newspaper Award nominations. Proof that we can compete, and often beat, the 'bigger names' in the industry.

Johan du Plessis
Managing Editor, Diamond Fields Advertiser