Daily Maverick: A model of the power of membership

In December, I will celebrate thirty years of working in journalism (or journalism-related work). Community has been at the centre of my work throughout most of my career—whether in my first journalism job as a regional reporter at the Hays Daily News in Western Kansas, engaged journalism at the BBC, managing community newspapers in Wisconsin, or even my current work at Pugpig. After years of watching the disruption in journalism, here are core beliefs I have about the industry:

• A media outlet's relationships with its audience are highly correlated with its sustainability.

• Product and audience-centric thinking align both the journalism produced and the user experience, which delivers loyalty and habit that is highly correlated with sustainability.

• Membership and engaged journalism are mutually reinforcing strategies for smaller and independent media organisations that deliver better commercial and editorial outcomes.

I just published a case study of South Africa’s Daily Maverick after interviewing its CEO, Styli Charalambous, about the indie publisher’s journey. They launched in 2009 as a for-profit business at a more optimistic time in South Africa and digital media. Despite publishing high-impact investigations, they struggled to become sustainable so they pivoted to non-profit, hoping that they could tap into philanthropy. That didn’t get them to the point of sustainability, even after they broke a story that would lead to the ouster of Jacob Zuma as president.

Styli developed an innovation tour of the US and visited the Washington Post, the New York Times and National Geographic. What stood out for him was that the most successful and optimistic outlets had a firm foundation of reader revenue. However, a paywall seemed antithetical to Daily Maverick’s mission, but he happened upon a research paper about membership.

He plots membership on a continuum of possible reader revenue models with subscriptions on one end and donations on the other. “At the heart of membership is a community of people joining a cause. People being part of something,” he said, and members have become part of their journalism.

After establishing their brand as a hard-hitting indie investigative publisher, they tested the model and had members within minutes. Styli said they used membership as a Trojan horse to introduce engaged journalism to the newsroom. Now, it is fully distributed across all of the editorial teams. The benefits of membership for members and the business include:

1. They developed a database of ‘superpowers’ their members have. They have tapped their members who are drone pilots. “One of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, who is a member, suggested a panel for an event and ended up being the moderator.” One of their first members even became their first community manager and is now their chief growth officer.

2. It leads to high-engagement products. Their “Your Questions Answered” newsletter which does what it says on the tin. Members ask questions, which are grouped by theme, and then they are answered by ministers, experts or other newsmakers. The newsletter goes out to 80,000 to 90,000 members. During this year’s elections, it had an 85%-90% open rate.

3. This high engagement leads to a high customer lifetime value because he said “after three years, 85% of people who start as a member are still there”. Now 40% of their revenue comes from their members.

What I love about this case study is that Daily Maverick is reaping the benefits of being this close to its members. As an audience-centric product leader, my goal is to make sure the editorial, product and business model are working to deliver the best for audiences and deliver returns to sustain the people who create the content. Daily Maverick shows the benefits of membership in creating a value-creating symbiotic relationship between members and journalists. It supports high-quality, high-engagement journalism that creates value for the news organisation, members and the broader society.

Now onto the links for this week.

Chris Stone, who I know from the New Statesman, has elevated their podcast operations. He is incredibly generous in sharing his expertise, and he recently highlighted a way for podcast publishers to drive consumption of their podcasts on YouTube, which was just shown to be the primary way audiences consume podcasts.

YouTube tops both Spotify and Apple when it comes to podcast distribution now.

With this huge reach, podcasts have emerged as an influential platform. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went on podcasts this year to reach audiences who had tuned out from traditional sources of news and information. Adweek tracks the rise of podcasts.

As if on cue, the Pew Research Center in the US released a report on news influencers. More than one in five Americans get their news and information from these influencers, who are mostly men. Only TikTok has an even gender balance. And slightly more 27% to 21% were Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump. Another interesting data point: Most news influencers are on X. As news organisations decide to de-prioritise X, it is becoming an alternate news source, or at least a home for alternate news sources.

This is going to be more and more common. LLMs are actually pretty good at summarising existing text, and as long as humans are in the loop, the process works pretty well too.

Have you left Twitter or X? I haven’t yet, but I don’t use it much. I am contemplating whether to leave. Most of my feelings about it are nostaligic, and X isn’t Twitter. X is an influence vehicle for its owner.

Media organisations and journalists don’t need to make some grand political display in leaving. Frankly, there is a strong business case posting there is a waste of resources. Social media has moved on, and news organisations’ time is best spent elsewhere. I said this in The Audiencers WhatsApp community.

Vertical video is something I’m about to dive into for one of my next research projects. The BBC started using vertical video in its app in 2017 and saw dramatic results in terms of the number of videos viewed and the number of users viewing video. The data is there to support that vertical video is a no brainer for engaging mobile audiences.

A good roundup from INMA about the thinking amongst US newsroom leaders after the election. Misinformation is overwhelming, and a lot of newsrooms are struggling with a lack of resources. This common stood out for me from one editor who wants to focus on “common interests and concerns across the county, across political divisions, and then hopefully start[ing] some conversations around those common areas of concern and interest.” Journalism as a service is a powerful way to re-establish its role in people’s lives.

Exhibit B on the usefulness of short-form, mostly vertical video. Francesca Barber, Politico’s executive director of global newsroom strategy. hit on themes that resonate with what Styli was talking about, namely listening and building a direct relationship with audiences.

“Trust is important here: it means listening, not just opining. It means having a direct relationship to audiences in the formats they are consuming (e.g. video, audio, shareable direct messages). And it means being clear who your audience is and building expectations and habit throughout the year, so that during an election cycle, they come to you.”