The Rand Daily Mail was founded in 1902 by businessman Harry Cohen and managed by editor Edgar Wallace. Cohen purchased the linotype machines and printing presses for the newspaper from Emmanuel Mendelssohn, equipment from the defunct ''The Standard and Diggers' News''. Extravagant operational expenses by Wallace almost bankrupted the newspaper and Cohen had to step in to limited spending. Bailey leased the paper out to three people, George H. Kingswell, who became the general manager, Ralph Ward Jackson its editor and A. V. Lindbergh its distributor as
CNA chairman. Strachan was sent to prison for a year and a half as a result. On 3 November 1978
Rand Daily Mail journalists Mervyn Rees and Chris Day reported on the use of public funds since 1973 to set up a
disinformation network in South Africa and abroad. The money was used in attempts to buy
The Washington Star, and to set up
The Citizen as a government-controlled counter to
The Rand Daily Mail. Hounded by the state, the paper's board decided to moderate its content for the sake of attracting more affluent white readers. This strategy led to financial losses and the newspaper was forced to close in 1985, eighty-three years after it was founded. After its closure, the black newspaper
The Sowetan described
The Rand Daily Mail as the first white newspaper to regard blacks as human beings. Yet for most of the apartheid period (1948–1990) the paper suffered from poor management, government infiltration, and state
censorship. The management often tried to replace more liberal editors with conservative ones. After the closure of
The Rand Daily Mail, some of its journalists (like
Anton Harber and
Irwin Manoim) pooled their severance pay to start the
Weekly Mail (now
Mail & Guardian), which carried on the anti-apartheid stance of its predecessor. == Resurrection as a website ==