Taking Chances With Media Membership in Zimbabwe
How might we make membership in news work in the global south?
Two years ago, I spent an academic year at Stanford University studying sustainable models for hyperlocal news as a John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellow. Prior to that, I had been running a hyperlocal news venture serving news desert communities in Matabeleland, southwestern Zimbabwe. My goal as a JSK Fellow was to unlock tactics for making a local news venture operationally sustainable in terms of having a diverse revenue base, a loyal audience, and a dynamic content strategy that meets its audience needs.
But how did we get here? Zimbabwe’s local media has been dominated by national news since the country gained its independence in 1980. This nationalized structure of the local media ecosystem left local communities in acute news deserts, unable to make decisions about their local democracy, and to contribute meaningfully to important national conversations. The Citizen Bulletin, a digital native newsroom I co-founded in 2017, was born out of this background to fill news deserts and to provide relevant local news to underserved communities of Matabeleland. As one of the pioneering local news ventures, The Citizen Bulletin continues to provide consistent coverage to underserved communities from Matabeleland.
Recently, the country’s local news ecosystem has improved, and a number of independent news sites producing local and national news have been launched. However, most of them face an uncertain future because they are struggling to become sustainable. The Citizen Bulletin is no exception. When we received our first grant in 2017, we believed grant funding would become our sole revenue source. After all, nonprofit journalism was still relatively new and excitement for donors to support mission-driven journalism was at its highest ebb. But a few years later, it is becoming increasingly clearer that philanthropy alone cannot sustain news.
In October 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I sat quietly in my library at home. I wasn’t thinking about the next amazing journalism project I should launch. No. I was thinking about where to get my next grant to sustain operations at The Citizen Bulletin. The news outlet had a wonderful year and received several grants to cover the pandemic, and our team had doubled, so expectations for another successful year from the team were very high. In Zimbabwe, journalism funding is scarce, and the few donors that exist prefer funding bigger, national media organizations, so our search funding is often external, but at that time there wasn’t any call for funding from International Foundations.
Luckily, in early November, I stumbled upon a call for funding from the Membership Puzzle Project (MPP). While at Stanford, I read a lot about MMP and how the initiative was supporting news organizations across the U.S to experiment with reader revenue, and I was inspired by pioneering news outlets such as the Devil Strip which was becoming a community cooperative. The MPP call was clear: It wanted organizations across the world who wanted to launch membership programs for their newsrooms. I knew The Citizen Bulletin desperately needed funding for the upcoming year. I also knew that the outlet needed a way out of over reliance on grant funding, so any effort that sought to support this shift was more that welcome. We applied, and in 2021 we became the first Zimbabwean newsroom to embark on a membership in news journey.
We had an idea of a membership initiative but we were completely new in the territory. After all, membership in news is a new phenomenon across the world. This meant that we had to try, make mistakes, and learn as we move. We did everything in the membership guide and got amazing support from the MPP coaches. We learnt from the Daily Maverick, a South African news outlet which had launched a successful membership program two years earlier, and applied some tactics in our newsroom. Everyone within our local news ecosystem began to marvel at us as our team started throwing around trendy terms such as “memberful routines”, “ladder of engagement”, “audience funnel” and many more. We were and are still convinced that we are in the right path, but perhaps what we had overlooked is that Zimbabwe’s media is not ripe for a paid membership program as a result of a number of problems, including media illiteracy and a poor economy.
In Zimbabwe, the media is highly polarized, and the state maintains a tight monopoly over the legacy media. Even the media laws which the country uses curtails free expression, and renders media literally a no go zone especially for low-income communities who rely on traditional media for news and information. This means a majority of local audiences who interact with the news are media illiterate and perceive news gathering and reporting as factory processes. For example, it is hard to convince local audiences to actively participate in storytelling by filling in the pitch pipeline as storytellers, not just sources because most of them still regard themselves as mere consumers of journalism. In addition to that, average readers can hardly avoid a newspaper or pay for a stable internet service to read the news online. As such, news comes to them as old newspapers, or for those with smartphones, it has to be sent to them as text, pdf, jpeg, or video via WhatsApp as they cannot access websites, or even native social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
In Zimbabwe news thrives as a free service. Selling news products in a comatose economy is an uphill task. Even hawking with a tote bag, which is what membership does, is an insurmountable task.
With mixed feelings about whether my team and I were doing the right thing or not about membership, I applied to be admitted into the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP) at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. My goal was twofold: I wanted to take a break from regular work (disclosure: working on my newsroom’s membership initiative had literally battered me and drained all my energy) to do something different, and at my pace. I also wanted to better understand the membership economy, learn what others in different media markets are doing and possibly replicate in my newsroom tactics that work. I think at the end of the 100 day marathon program I had achieved both.
Although when it comes to membership programs everyone emphasizes monetization, one important idea I learnt in the program is that for others like us, membership is more of building relationships with our audiences, as the ultimate benefit, not just money. When I joined the EJCP I had immense pressure to quickly learn tactics for squeezing out money from our members. However, at the end of the program I had taken away that burden from my shoulders because I had learnt that membership takes many forms; for others its about the greenback while for some it’s about audience participation in journalism.
For audiences who have always known closed journalism that shuts out alternative voices such as is the case in Zimbabwe, to find a news outlet that allows them to share their story ideas, freely interact with reporters, and/or give feedback to stories, is priceless.
This is the kind of membership in news which The Citizen Bulletin has pioneered in Zimbabwe. It is not based on cash, but the value our audiences derive from our participatory journalism, and the value they give back by sharing story ideas with us, re-sharing our content or attending our events.
During a round robin mentorship session organized by the EJCP towards the end of our 100 days, I confided to one coach about the challenges I was facing getting buy in from our readers concerning paid membership. She quipped: “I think you need a media literacy program more than a membership marketing program.” I agree with her entirely. My advice for those wishing to launch membership in complicated media markets such as Zimbabwe is that they need to invest in a moneyless membership program first, and focus on media literacy while they build a case for a paid membership. This is what I have been working towards at The Citizen Bulletin after my participation in the life-changing EJCP classes. I interacted often with my fellow cohort members during our classes, and came to a conclusion that when it comes to membership, or any other revenue model, there is no one size fits all approach. However, creators from the global south always seem to respond to pressure from global north creators whose media markets and environments support experimentation, and failure.
In the global south, Zimbabwe included, there is little or no opportunities for experimenting and failing because even most grant funders misconstrue iteration with failure. We need to foster new ways for journalism and media innovation in the global south, and this is a call to all local entrepreneurial journalism creators to be “The Phoenix Rising” of our local journalism. I believe that revenue strategies such as membership, events or merchandise sales — which seem to work elsewhere — need more iteration in low media markets than in established media markets. This is the second year since my newsroom, The Citizen Bulletin, adopted a “memberful” approach to journalism, and while we are yet to unlock funding from our members, the support we are getting in terms of story ideas, attendance to our events, content re-sharing and feedback to our stories, is priceless. If you’d like to give me feedback, please email me via devyndube1@gmail.com or message me via Twitter.
