South African English online news portal Daily Maverick implemented a 24-hour blackout this week as it pleaded for financial support. A journalist on X begged that without support, she could lose her job.
Another online publisher Max Du Preez responded to the shutdown: “The bakeries have decided not to bake bread for a day because they want you to appreciate the bread so much that you would happily pay for it.” Daily Maverick offers free content, a subscription with some extra perks and it has donor funding. Still, this is not nearly enough.
SA will be holding national elections in six weeks. The stakes have never been this high since Nelson Mandela became SA’s first President in 1994. There will be three ballots instead of the usual two and, the highest number of candidates in the running.
Newsrooms, both print and online, need lots more money to cover this election. Many are struggling as free social media and tech platforms Google, X, Meta, TikTok, and others have gobbled up readers and online advertising, leading to massive retrenchments.
I pay a monthly membership fee of R200 for Daily Maverick which is one of the better qualitative online publications. It used to provide some of the best investigative journalism and broke some important stories, notably the Gupta/Zuma relationship and ensuing corruption.
Recently I was turned off Daily Maverick after having seen it repeatedly carry the opinion pieces of Greg Mills and Ray Hartley who act as propagandists representing the colonial views that serve the billionaire mining family, the Oppenheimers, and its ilk. The Oppenheimer Family founded the Brenthurst Foundation. Mills heads the Foundation and Hartley is a researcher. Mills’s background is revealing.
He was an advisor to the commander of the British Army during the Afghanistan war and “served four deployments.” He is close to policymakers in the US. Mills’ footprint is everywhere in Africa too. He was an advisor to Rwandan Leader Paul Kagame and was involved with several heads of African governments on “reform” projects in Africa.
Interestingly, several of these countries became pro-Israel. In a stealthy move, Israel obtained observer status in the African Union in 2021. It was the only country outside Africa to have this privilege. This is reminiscent of the way the US pro-Israel lobby AIPAC works to influence policy. The Brenthurst Foundation has more than enough resources for what I believe is an attempted capture of foreign policy. Thanks to pressure from SA, Israel’s observer status was suspended.
Why is Daily Maverick, which brilliantly covered state capture in SA, giving propagandists so much space while the world watches a genocide live, leading to the biggest geopolitical battles of our time? Mills/Hartley produce foreign policy articles that verge on bigotry and perpetuate a Western colonial narrative.
As a member of the Daily Maverick community, I found this annoying and questioned whether this was about money. I chatted with several people in media circles who subscribe to the publication and found that I was not alone in this sentiment.
The Oppenheimer family funds a string of interlinked organisations with an agenda to promote the kind of democracy that will not touch its status quo - keeping intact the form of rapacious capitalism that made it super-wealthy. SA’s foreign policy is a thorn in its side. Was the Brenthurst Foundation buying its way into a decent publication at a time when it most needed cash?
Many of us who support Daily Maverick found this untenable. I thought of canceling my membership and repeatedly tweeted the question: who is funding Daily Maverick? The publication was tagged but no one from the Daily Maverick responded.
So who funds Daily Maverick?
In the early days, there was no real disclosure. When Maverick was a print magazine it was leaked that Tokyo Sexwale was a backer. It is unknown if there were others. When funding dried up, Maverick founder Branko Brkic had to shut down the publication.
Years later, he started Daily Maverick online as a free publication but urged people to become members or subscribers. This model comes with fragility as, instinctively, people gravitate towards free content.
Daily Maverick has some advertising it gets some paid-for content which it declares. I first struggled to find Daily Maverick’s funders and shareholders on its current website but if you scroll down you will find the details under “Community” and then click About us .
While there is no mention of Oppenheimer or Brenthurst, several Trusts own “less than 15% each” but remain opaque.
The publication states that “no individual donor contributes more than 5% of our total income” and discloses those funders who donated more than R150,000 “in the last twelve months.” However, this website entry is not dated so it is hard to tell whether this is the latest data.
On the face of it, Daily Maverick is hardly rolling in cash. Like other news publishers, it is constantly looking for funding. Some of its funders provide money for selective things, like training or investigative projects. I understand that the staff do not get fancy packages, but just earn a salary. A fair amount of content comes from contributors who do not get paid. I contributed two such pieces.
The dominant online news source in South Africa is News24. It is part of a large media company owned by Naspers. News24 told the Competition Commission at recent hearings that it had 100,000 subscribers but was still struggling to break even because of Big Tech platforms, particularly Meta and Google.
If Daily Maverick is to survive using its current funding model that leans on memberships and donations, it has to get readers to trust it. Just as there is mistrust in our government, there is mistrust in media houses too. This is why full transparency on ownership and funding, is so important.
While Big Tech platforms are hurting publications globally and newsrooms are hemorrhaging journalists, publications cannot take the risk of taking their readers for granted.
It is also disheartening to read seasoned journalists writing rubbish about the Independent Electoral Commission. Is there anyone seriously looking at the content that gets published? Dirty politics are being played out amongst political parties and journalists should not jump into these fights but report on them fairly.
Reg Rumney, a research associate at Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies summed this up best in 2022 in the Mail and Guardian: “While funding of news is important it’s only one side of the equation. The audience cannot be overlooked and, without an audience, publishers and broadcasters are shouting into the void. Audiences cannot be taken for granted…”
As a paying member of the Daily Maverick community, I would like to see it do better and rebuild trust in the media. Moreover, I hope that Daily Maverick considers what it stands for rather than a generalist declaration that it is about Truth. Amabungane and GroundUp are great examples of transparency. Full disclosure of ownership and funding sources adds to the credibility of a publication and is important in the drive toward sustainability.
Dear Shareen, I regard Ground Up with scepticism, because they say on their website that they will not publish content that contains challenging of the notion of anthropogenic climate change (through carbon emission) and of germ theory in contemporary virology. This setting of the boundaries for what are 'legitimate' viewpoints is not only unscientific but carries within it the spectre of totalitarianism when it is also reflected in the mainstream media. I have read broadly and deeply the critiques of germ theory including the arguments against the existence of viruses and am slowly uncovering the scientific positions that question whether global warming is driven by carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) or by solar radiation cycles. For the record, my position (based on considerable reading) is that global warming is anthropogenically-caused, and with respect to viruses, that neither the HIV nor the (so-called) coronavirus (and all the others in between) have been isolated according to the four protocols of the famous German virologist Robert Koch - I also treat my health according to alternative and integrated medicine and avoid anti-histamines and anti-biotics unless I am suffering a serious, life-threatening condition, and I have successfully nursed my own inflammations for the last 10 years. Ground Up is headed by Nathan Geffen, a key figure on the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and I think it is funded by inter alia the Bertha Foundation. It would be interesting to research Ground Up's funding in depth, and similarly for the TAC. regards, Paul.
Great article Shareen, I share your sentiments totally. I also became concerned when the focus left investigations and turned to global news. Then the war in Ukraine came, and suddenly it seemed DM had turned into a Ukrainian mouthpiece for NATO and the US Empire. And then, after Oct 7, the genocide was ignored for so long I seriously contemplated just ignoring them completely. Fortunately they are slightly understanding the need for audience trust, but they have a lot of rebuilding to do.