ROB ROSE: No room for complacency in the media

There’s a story that Branko Brkic recounts in the beginning of the book celebrating the 10th anniversary of Daily Maverick that tells you so much about his indefatigable character. It starts some years after he arrived in SA in 1991, as a 29-year-old book publisher with just 7kg of luggage and R2,500 in his pocket, fleeing Slobodan Milosevic’s tyrannical onslaught in Yugoslavia.

In 2005, after various publishing jobs, Brkic launched a magazine, Maverick, with the tagline "A business magazine for people with brains and money".

He says: "I did not want boring people to read it. I did not want grey people, sitting in grey cubicles, with grey suits and grey bags, driving grey Toyota Camrys with the faux leather grey interior." So, to make this point crystal clear, he wrote on the subscription card in the magazine: "Camry drivers need not apply."

Only, the problem was that Toyota had just bought a year’s worth of advertising, upfront. In a letter scrapping the advertising deal, Toyota’s executives wrote: "You people have no brains, and soon, no money."

It illustrates a central theme of the book We Have a Game Changer: Brkic is a man for whom passion was always going to trump corporate diplomacy and profit projections. Today, the successor to the magazine, Daily Maverick, is a decade old, and intrinsic to the SA fabric. Its painstaking stories on the Gupta leaks, Tom Moyane’s tenure at the SA Revenue Service, and the VBS Mutual Bank heist are largely definitive of those scandals.

And Brkic has done it through the force of an unyielding personality. His idealism, which should have died long ago, insisted that money would follow quality journalism.

Which, of course, it often doesn’t. Styli Charalambous, who joined Brkic in October 2009, says: "When people ask ‘How old is Daily Maverick?’, I say ‘X number of payrolls’, because getting through each one was so tough."

For two years from 2011, neither he nor Brkic took a salary half the time. Brkic says: "We were scrounging every flippin’ cent … it affected us badly. I was sick. For eight months, I took a fistful of steroids every day."

Every day he thought about failure. But the fact that he and Charalambous are "impossibly stubborn" trumped the inevitable. They had no choice but to keep going.

Most people don’t realise how exquisitely delicate SA’s media institution really is. The commercial media, like the FM and Business Day, are far less profitable and more precarious than two decades ago. And the excellent nonprofits, like Daily Maverick and amaBhungane, are often one bad fundraising cycle away from collapse.

In the US, advertising revenue for US newspapers is a quarter what it was in 2006, but online advertising hasn’t come close to making up this gap.

Still some quality journalism is thriving. The New York Times has 4.9-million subscribers, even if, for the nine months to September, its operating profit fell 15%. The Financial Times now has 1-million subscribers, even if it made a slim profit of £8.1m last year. But the point is, survival isn’t certain — there’s no place for complacency.

Brkic knows this. I’ve known him for years, often meeting him at his informal office at the Hyde Park Woolworths. Many times, he’d flip open his laptop, then make you take a blood oath of secrecy before unveiling the newest design incarnation of the site. It’s infectious. And it illustrates how you won’t find any other media owner who cares more about what journalism can do.

This past weekend, Daily Maverick received another roundabout commendation, when EFF leader Julius Malema described it as an "enemy". And you know it’s because it published something awfully inconvenient for Malema, like, say, how money from VBS went to buy R900,000 worth of Gucci suits and Le Coq Sportif gear.

If you starve the EFF of oxygen, it won’t disappear. All you’ll do is starve the public of the truth

Speaking on Sunday, at the close of the EFF’s leadership conference, Malema said his party respects media freedom. "We have no problem with any media, just don’t declare us an enemy," he said, before immediately contradicting himself by declaring eNCA as "criminal" and saying: "We’ll fight them to the grave."

It’s a pathology evident in the ANC and the DA too: if a journalist asks a tough question, they’re labelled as "taking sides". So much for being "committed to democracy".

Some argue that Malema’s intolerance of the press is consistent with a fascist mindset, the red berets being comparable to Mussolini’s blackshirts.

But Milton Shain, University of Cape Town emeritus professor of historical studies, wrote recently that while there are similarities (like the authoritarian leadership and desire to destroy political enemies), Malema "slots far better into the category of racial nationalist, with populist leanings. Identity and exclusion define his politics … his populism and hostility towards whites finds fertile ground in a society with glaring racial inequality and poverty."

This week, when the EFF barred Daily Maverick, amaBhungane and eNCA from its conference, calls grew louder for other media to stop covering Malema. It’s a seductive idea: deprive the EFF of oxygen and it won’t have a platform for its antidemocratic views.

In We Have a Game Changer, Brkic says this debate first cropped up years ago. But he argues: "We need to shout the truth about Malema … if left to do whatever he pleases, protected in anonymity by the media’s self-imposed silence, he could have arranged to win every tender imaginable."

If you starve the EFF of oxygen, it won’t disappear. All you’ll do is starve the public of the truth.