The truth is on life support, but you can help to save it from the morgue
DM168
Ijust got off a call with our DM168 publisher, Susie White, who made me realise that by the end of today, Friday, the day we print our paper, I would have been at work for 12 days nonstop.
I only realised I had been running this work marathon after Susie asked me how I was feeling. To tell the truth, I hadn’t stopped to think about it.
Let me cut to the chase: “Hi, I’m Heather and I’m a workaholic.”
It’s not laudable, fashionable, admirable or kind to my family or myself. And when the Grim Reaper inevitably comes knocking, I’m not going to get as much as a split second to say: “Why didn’t I rather?”
I am not the only one at Daily Maverick or in our global tribe of journalists who is driven by a missionary zeal to tell stories, explain the chaos, expose the corrupt and be part of the thrill of truth-telling.
We are born to feel the weight of the world, the unbalanced scales of justice and bullshit, and are compelled to do something, anything, to shine light on it, hoping to make a positive impact.
Granted, we journalists, being human, are fallible. Sometimes we are moved less by serving the greater good than by chasing the scoop, the awards, the influence, the hobnobbing with the rich and famous, the self-righteousness of being the good guys when actually good and bad are not a Manichaean black and white but a head-spinning 50,000 shades of grey.
How can we provide a reflection of our society in this undulating, cracked global Hall of Mirrors, manipulated by teens in Eastern European troll factories, AI bots, populist fearmongers, con artists, criminals and conspiracy theorists?
That, dear readers, is what keeps us up all night. It is our core challenge when all over the world there is talk about news journalism being on the brink of extinction. Yes, like the dinosaurs wiped out by the meteorite. It is that bad. The business model for journalism has been massively disrupted by the global digital behemoths such as Google and Facebook.
It is also the result of short-sighted, greedy owners who did not invest in training the next layer of leadership in journalism and innovation agile enough to navigate the digital age. Our extinction-event meteor also comes in the form of a shift in companies’ marketing mix, as many chase clicks and instant hits.
You might wonder why we keep on doing this work when we are so vulnerable. It’s simple. Journalism is not a job; it’s a calling. It was abundantly clear to me, listening to my colleagues discussing innovations at our strategy meeting last weekend, that nobody is going to give up on our vision to defend truth. We have each other and we have you, our loyal readers.
How can you help us to survive? By signing up as Maverick Insiders to support our journalism so that it can remain free, keeping everyone informed. By subscribing to our newspaper or going out to buy it. By buying our cool Daily Maverick gear and books. By being active citizens. By attending our events, like the upcoming Gathering in Cape Town.
If you are a CEO or marketing manager, dare to take an ad in our newspaper and on our website and see what an impact you will make on your triple bottom line.
Friends, we are at our most vulnerable right now as an industry, a country, a world. We need you to support not just Daily Maverick but also all credible media so that we can keep on digging deep, casting a light on things that the divisive and crooked would like to keep in the dark.
In this week’s DM168 we publish our next analysis of the manifesto of a political party, this time the party that earned the third-largest number of votes in the 2019 election, a party many young people love and older people despise – the EFF. Our political team, Ferial Haffajee and Queenin Masuabi, look critically at the manifesto and assess what it is about the party that has meaning for its core voters.
Our lead story by Chris Makhaye is based on a fascinating interview with businessman and political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki, former president Thabo Mbeki’s brother. Mbeki pulls no punches and eloquently spells out five mortal sins that the ANC has committed since it came to power in 1994.
Write to me at heather@dailymaverick. co.za – I need your thoughts to share on our readers’ page. You can also submit a photograph to be selected as our readers’ picture of the week.