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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.