Daily Maverick founder Branko Brkic on the hard-hitting journalism that sells memberships in South Africa - Digiday

Paywalls and digital subscriptions may be on the rise at digital media companies around the U.S., but South Africa presents a different case.

“You can’t debate the issue that you need income from your readers to be part of your stream of income. But we really do not believe that the paywall is a way to go,” Brkic said on the Digiday Podcast.— make the content free, but ask your readers for support at every turn. And in Brkic’s telling, it’s worked. Over last two years, the company has gained 13,000 paying members, each paying at least 75 South African Rand per month.Brkic founded the Daily Maverick in 2009, the year after the financial crisis decimated the digital advertising market and taking his previous publication — a magazine simply named Maverick —out of commission in December 2008.

The magazine’s online successor delivers shoe leather reporting in a country with insular news organizations and reporters who failed to go beyond stenography. “What South African media for many, many years got used to is basically going to press conferences,” Brkic said. Brkic’s bolder take on journalism included an award-winning investigation into the police killing of 34 striking miners in 2012.

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