Our heritage

Egner, a Botswana citizen, was the brains behind the paper. The Examiner's first edition was a glossy colour affair which coincided with the annual Gaborone International Trade Fair making a fairly handsome profit according to Egner.

The paper subsequently moved to cheaper black and white newsprint production as an eight pages weekly English Language newspaper based in Gaborone with a circulation of between 5,000 and 7,000 copies, compared with the Guardian which started seven weeks later with a circulation of 3,500 copies weekly. The emergence of the The Examiner was welcomed by many readers as a "bird of good omen" in a land that had for too long suffered from a chronic lack of a quality private press, judging from readers' letters. It had a high-minded journalistic tone, particularly on public policy issues, unmatched in the history of the press in Botswana.