Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who—fearing government disapproval—may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited several of these reporters during the May 1994 election and describes their post-apartheid working experience in a new preface and epilogue.

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid and A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, both published by California.

"Dateline Soweto neither sensationalizes nor patronizes. . . . Part of the book's richness is its usefulness as a primer for the interested but uninitiated, serving as a concrete, precise textbook of sorts, with drama, provocative ideas, new perspectives and rarely heard voices added."—Sheila Rule, New York Times Book Review

"Along with the story of how black journalists manage to function, Dateline Soweto is also a fascinating history of the South African press. . . . Finnegan deftly articulates the delicate status of black reporters working for the white press in two wonderful chapters [which] while dealing specifically with the situation of South African journalists, could well be required reading for their American counterparts."—Jill Nelson, Washington Post Book World

"Documents better than most a particularly complicated and historically significant relationship of journalism to politics."—Chandra Mukerji, coeditor of Rethinking Popular Culture