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.

Twitter (before Musk) was more popular with journalists than it was useful as an editorial tool because it was a water cooler/conversational space for journalists and also because journalists could use it to build a profile outside of their publication and network for their next job. Yes, it could be useful to find out what some politicians thought and for sports, but outside of those niches, it didn’t deliver that much for media companies - particularly local publications.

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.”

How journalism can help rebuild civic society in the US

In the lead-up to the US election, I have been reading Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. He charts major social and political trends from the Gilded Age, a period of inequality and extreme partisanship in the US. People have drawn a lot of parallels between the current period in the US and the years leading up to the Civil War. Putnam draws another parallel, the last years of the 19th Century and 20th Century. It was a period of extreme inequality, racial repression and violence. “The tide of strikes, violence and eventually anarchist terrorism that had been across the industrializing North in the 1870s would not recede until the 1920s.” Institutionalised Jim Crow segregation began during this period, and the Supreme Court upheld those laws in its 1896 ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the great injustices in US history. It would allow "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races”. Putnam says a “wave of black lynchings surged in the 1880s, reaching the appalling rate of an atrocity every other day in 1892”.

Putnam says American politics across the country was “violently riven as it had not been for nearly half a century” during the Civil War. In the Gilded Age, the age of the robber barons in the US:

The very intensity of these partisan divisions prevented major new problems from being recognised and resolved. In the eyes of increasing numbers of voters, the two traditional political parties and their leaders were not helping the country to address newly pressing issues.

This sounds and feels very familiar. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ and even Nixon ruled as reformers. A progressive coalition of Republicans and Democrats identified and addressed major new problems. Education, income equality and longevity all increased during this period. His thesis is that the US pivoted from an “I” society during the Gilded Age to a “We” society during the long progressive era in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century. But then it swung back quickly to an “I” society.

By several measures, the US is now in the same situation as the Gilded Age, with declines in educational attainment, a rise in inequality and even a decline in life expectancy, driven by “deaths of despair”. Putnam outlines how the US can return to a “We” society and the kind of positive problem-solving and better outcomes. I’m not to that part of the book yet. But this is all to say: The US has been here before, and journalism played a role in the progressive era with the famous muckrakers’ reporting supporting antitrust, health and safety and labour reforms and helped to raise awareness about housing conditions and the violence of lynching.

What journalists can do to help restore civic society

I can’t wait to get to the part of The Upswing where Putnam talks about how we can restore civic society. Even before getting to that part of the book, I know that journalism could play a role in helping with this necessary work.

I heard from many friends immediately after the election that they were shifting their focus from national politics to their communities, and local journalism can support their communities to identify and solve their problems.

Audience engagement leader and innovator Ariel Zirulnick outlined several tactics to achieve. First and foremost, she called on journalists to see “people as voters beyond the elections”. Ultimately, I think she is calling on journalists to understand people’s concerns about their communities and how the government can address those concerns, and their concerns do not follow election cycles. (She makes a distinction between issues and concerns.)

It gives you jobs to be done, jobs like: 

• Tracking an elected politician’s campaign promise so voters know whether to reelect them in four years 
• Helping someone get involved in an issue they learned about during the campaign

• Teaching newly engaged locals about how other civic processes work 

She gave examples of this in action, such as Atlanta Civic Circle’s 10,000-person regional panel, Atlanta POV. It is like the editorial board common at local newspapers but at a scale made possible with modern survey tools. They hope in the future that this can become a neighbourhood-level story engine. News outlets can also capture highly engaged people they contacted during elections as a source for a panel like this and remain engaged with them, a process outlined by AmyJo Brown in a guide to “using voting districts to structure listening tours”. And lastly, the Milwaukee Journal has decided to continue its Main Street Agenda project past the elections.

She has a lot of great ideas in her piece, and one of my favourites is building an engagement loop around the election and using this to develop new products. If publishers were to create a segment of audiences highly engaged during the elections, they could create newsletters, events and special coverage to continue to serve these readers.

Dan Kennedy recommends people find a local news outlet to support. Research has shown the decline in local news has led “to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization”, Dan Kennedy says. “Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.,” he added.

And now onto links for this week.

In the newsletter I write I Pugpig, I looked at how my friend Janne Rygh refocused analytics at two Amedia properties so that they could better target young audiences. It’s a great case study on why changing platforms and formats will only get you so far in terms of engaging youth audiences. You’ll have to have reconsider your content strategy.

And on that note, Amalie Nash outlines how to create a content strategy. Her point about creating KPIs is directly related to the experiment that Janne carried out. She realised that their KPIs were leading them to create content for their core audiences, which skewed older.

Facebook has de-emphasised news in its feed, and Elon Musk has banned journalists from X who have criticised him. LinkedIn is heading in the opposite direction. The key to engaging LinkedIn audiences is to understand the audience (which is always the case). How will this news impact someone’s business or career?

I recently co-led a session for the News Product Alliance Summit about audience development in the post-platform era. Many publishing professionals during the session said that Google Discover had become a key, but erratic traffic driver for them. I even heard recently from a publishing leader that Google had told them not even to try to understand how Discover works.

I’m a Discover user. It’s highly sensitive to what I read. If I click on a link, it will start adding that topic into my Discover feed. In Chrome on my iPad, I can also add sites to follow. I am surprised that more publishers aren’t encouraging audiences to do this.

Experience in my day job is that Discover can drive traffic and, more importantly, subscriptions.

A fascinating project funded by the Knight Foundation to answer reporters’ questions in real-time during the election. “ The nearly 100 election experts on hand to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, attorneys specializing in election law, nonpartisan voter access advocates, misinformation researchers, public policy professors, and more. “

Finding out the needs (and wants) of local news audiences

Earlier this year, I wrote about the demand problem for local news. This is especially true for young audiences, which as the Pew Research Center reported in May 2024 only 9% of Americans 18 to 29 follow local news very closely. People with higher levels of education are less likely to follow local news. It doesn’t matter whether the Americans are Democrats or Republicans, neither groups follow local news particularly well.

Surveys show a disconnect between the value people say they put on local news, their interest in and their propensity to pay. Americans say that local news is important. “Eighty-five percent of U.S. adults say that local news outlets “are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,” including 44% who say they’re “extremely” or “very” important,” a Pew-Knight study found. However, they are reading it less, and only 15% of Americans have paid for it. But, that’s far better than the 8% of people in the UK. The research describes the contradictions, but it doesn’t say why. It doesn’t simply seem to be due to the sources of information that people have. Yes, audiences are getting more of their news from social media but that doesn’t address why people are consuming less local news and why a fundamental contradiction exists between the importance they place on local news and their actual consumption and support of it.

Fortunately, people who are grappling with these issues with news at several levels. I connected with Julia Gitis, a civic tech entrepreneur, through the News Product Alliance. In the summer of 2022, she noticed the old newspaper vending machines had been removed from her neighbourhood. “(She) was even more convinced that having a modern and digital version of the news racks would help people in San Francisco engage with their communities,” she wrote. Her vision is to create a neighbourhood digital bulletin boards “to strengthen democracy and civic engagement”. Julia told me that people were more interested in local events and sharing information about their pets. Other feedback includes a desire for art from local artists, community resources and interactive games.

They recently hosted a listening session with community members to give them a hands-on experience with their first digital prototype and to understand their local news needs. Their findings? "Residents like local news more in theory than in practice." They don’t use the local news section of their prototype that much, and they found some level of news avoidance in their listening session. “One resident told us ‘The news is so troubling lately, I feel like I need to escape,’ a sentiment echoed by many people we spoke to.” They also received feedback about content features they hadn’t tought of including promotions for neighbourhood businesses and local classified ads for things like dog walking and other hyper-local services. It shows that even in San Francisco, the centre of digital disruption, there is still room to make money from marketing local services.

This is great open on-the-ground testing of local news needs, and I love how Julia and her collaborators are co-creating a local news solution, not only in terms of hardware but also in terms of partnering with local businesses, schools and other stakeholders. I also like the honesty about the results. Local news was the original goal, but communities are expressing a broader range of local information needs.

The model that Julia is testing is interesting. It’s not so much a news source as it is a novel model of distribution. (If you’re looking for novel models for news sources, check out LION Publishers’ growing roster.) She has placed importance on the fact that it is in a public place, which again is a different model. It’s also unlike the large screens we have in major rail stations in Europe, which are passive. These screens are interactive and on ground level amongst people.

The kind of on-the-ground research that Julia is doing is fascinating, and it reminds me of the research in Medill Survey of local news consumption in Chicago. Product managers always ask why, and I will keep my eye out for additional research that asks why. And in the market research that I’m responsible for, I’m going to be asking more why questions.

And now onto the links for the week.

Americans go to the polls in person on Tuesday 5 November, although 75m US voters have already cast their ballots, which is 48% of the number of votes cast in the 2020 election. To endorse or not to endorse has been quite a controversy in the US. Both the LA Times and Washington Post opting not to, and both papers have paid dearly for it. The Washington Post has lost a quarter of a million subscribers for owner Jeff Bezos decision, and it has renewed criticisms about CEO Will Lewis which had died down. The Guardian spotted an opportunity to win over American readers looking for a paper to support and took advantage of it. It shows how the age of reader revenue (subscriptions and membership) changes the dynamic between audiences and the publications they pay for.

The UK government is floating ideas similar to Canada and Australia that local news providers should be compensated by the platforms for their content that appears on platforms. Platforms have a mixed record in their response to this legislation. In Canada, it led to local publishers being delisted with punishing results for small, independent publishers.

With major publishers striking deals with OpenAI and others to licence their content to train AI platforms, there is another player in the space to act as a middleman.

My friend, Janne Rygh, an Editorial Content Developer at Amedia, is leading an initiative to engage younger readers and convert them to subscribers. 87% of pageviews come from registered users, which as Janne says means they know a lot more about their audience and what they are doing. That’s great, but despite this excellent shift from anonymous to known users, their subscribers overall are aging. Nearly half of their subscribers are older than 60. It took some convincing of senior stakeholders, but Janne got the green light to trial efforts at two of Amedia’s 130 newspapers. Some of this isn’t too revolutionary: To engage young readers, you have to write about them. They also uncovered topics they needed to write about including early education (Kindergarten), personal economics issues (wallet issues) as well as health and family life.

Interestingly, INMA has new report out that Gen Z might be into print. They want non-digital experiences, and hey, if vinyl and cassettes can make a comeback, I guess print can too.