Dear Maverick Insider,
If you go to the Daily Maverick pages today, you will see that we have shut down for 24 hours.
We have never shut down before in the nearly 15 years we’ve been around.
This was not an easy decision, but we felt compelled to highlight the global crisis journalism faces and what that means for our democracy and our economy.
Newsrooms across the world and South Africa are retrenching staff and closing down.
The impact is devastating. Just look around.
Our cities are failing in lockstep with the demise of local journalism, with no accountability measures interrogating a broken system. With that, our economy can’t grow, businesses struggle to create new jobs, and the tax base shrinks, creating a larger burden per person.
As we are a national news site, there is a misconception that we are in every corner of South Africa.
We are not.
Our inboxes are full every day with tip-offs from whistleblowers and requests to help when water, electricity or basic services have not been provided.
There are simply not enough journalists to counter the volume of corruption, mismanaged funds and ineptitude that we know is happening in municipalities and institutions throughout the country.
If we could hire more, we could change this. There is more than enough work to triple the number of journalists we currently have.
Advertising revenue, grant funding, and philanthropic support are drying up. Your contributions have kept Daily Maverick alive.
After five years of Maverick Insider, only 27,960 amazing human beings — like you — have chosen to support us and keep our work free for all to access. This is just a small percentage of the site’s visitors, averaging around 10 million per month.
Sadly, it’s not enough to do the required job in a country ravaged by corruption.
We need to do much more for South Africa, like creating a dedicated team of journalists to cover our broken education system and establishing teams of local journalists to cover our eight biggest cities with a daily report. Local news has been destroyed by economic disruption and compromised newsrooms.
So we had to do something drastic — something to show what it would feel like if journalism were silenced due to a failing market.
Today, there will be no reporting.
There will be no investigations.
There will be no updates.
There will be no accountability.
This crisis is bigger than us — it’s bigger than one newsroom and any story. That’s why we need to make such a bold statement.
We understand that this 24-hour interruption is frustrating, especially for our Maverick Insider members, who carry the weight of Daily Maverick’s support. However, it is nothing compared to what will happen if journalism collapses.
In the meantime, if you want to help even more, here are some suggestions:
