The Insider South Sudan propelled from improbable to indomitable in just 100 Days
From the beginning, there was just an idea, a brilliant idea that crept up in 2018 when I was working with Juba Monitor newspaper, South Sudan’s leading independent English daily as a copy editor and head of the Sports Investigations Desk. I had grown bored of the daily routine of reporting hard news without impact on the community or influencing policies.
I had honed my skill in reporting human interest stories, investigating government corruption, local organized crimes, sports, and environmental stories which eventually earned me my first international award at the 2021 Fetisov Journalism award ceremony when we were announced as winners, of the 3rd place, for Outstanding Investigative Reporting.
The idea was to start a nonprofit newsroom or company to focus on underreported stories in South Sudan. In April 2019, I shared the idea with two of my colleagues at a Money Laundering workshop in Naivasha, Kenya.
That day, the idea became a dream to pursue knowing I had the backing of some of the best journalists of my generation. The Insider Limited was born, an investigative news site in South Sudan that would go on to become the first news outlet in the country to focus on investigative journalism, something no other media house dares to do because of the risk of government reprisals and the high cost in time and energy to produce such stories.
Was that enough? No! Registering my dream media entity was not enough to feel satisfied with a milestone achieved. I increasingly sought more opportunities to enable me to serve my country in the best possible way by providing coverage of stories that are underreported by the mainstream media in South Sudan and helping bridge the information gap and providing our audience with fact-based news and information.
By end of 2021, I had already won some fellowships to study in the US and the last just ended when a friend, Linda Austin, sent me a call for applications for the 2022 Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at the City University of New York (CUNY). It was the perfect opportunity to build and develop our new product, a PDF newspaper, that would help us circulate news directly to our audience via WhatsApp messaging app and also allow us to reach a broader audience, sell ads and most importantly circumvent censorship by the notorious government of South Sudan that has closed more media houses, both print and digital media, than necessary just to suppress press freedom in the world’s youngest nation.
What the EJCP taught me
Before the EJCP, I thought The Insider had everything we needed to thrive and be successful. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. Learning from the great instructors through the 100-day period left me with no option but to “do correction” of what I and my team had set in place.
For instance, sitting in my apartment listening to Anita Li’s ideas for the evolution of a business model of an entrepreneurial project like The Insider and how she persuades you to craft a value proposition for a media entity, the value a company promises to deliver to customers who buy their product.
Now I had to adopt this idea as part of The Insider’s overall marketing strategy and create the value proposition that provides a declaration of intent or a statement that introduces our brand to news consumers or readers by telling them what The Insider South Susan stands for, how it operates and why they should support our ideas to enable us to continue to provide quality journalism in South Sudan, a country that’s barely 10 years old with so much to provide for its citizens.
South Sudan’s transition to democracy demands that the public has accurate, impartial, and objective news to help citizens make important decisions. With the knowledge and skills that EJCP has provided me, I strongly believe we shall meet this goal over time.
Entrepreneurs Amanda McLoughlin and her husband Eric Silver have taught me how to run a media venture with a small committed team. This means trimming down my team to a manageable number who are passionate and dedicate their time, energy, and money to propel The Insider toward achieving its short-term and long-term goals.
Working with a large team for the three years since we started sort of made us lose sight of the target, now with a small number of people who will mean business, we shall be able to keep our eyes on the prize. Set goals that are meaningful to us and redefine what success really looks like for us as far as making enough money to sustain The Insider and making a community impact is concerned. We want people to tell us that they are looking forward to the day of our publication so they can read our news stories.
This brings me to Hamish McKenzie, one of the three founders of Substack, a business product is its model that pays much attention to content instead of focusing on raising revenue through ads. Hamish believes in having great writers in the ecosystem so that others also want to be there, in a media empire where one can own and control content and have a direct relationship with readers who shall in turn guarantee you more than 40 percent of subscription revenues from direct recommendations.
This is something that could work for The Insider right away if we find the people we really trust, and build an intentional relationship to get these people into my inbox as well as my colleagues’ inbox. “It’s a potential paying subscriber that you otherwise not might have got,” according to Hamish.
He also had ideas I resonate with such as building trust with the people in our network, focusing more on community and audience engagement, and building a discipline cultural outcome instead of focusing solely on a big business outcome to reap fat profits.
This means The Insider has to diversify its revenue in ways that still make our readers our customers and not necessarily look in the direction of advertisers.
Lastly, another idea that is going to be helpful for The Insider among others, is Aldana Vales’ and Jeremy Caplan’s presentations on audience research.
Aldana is a journalist obsessed with helping communities be better informed, and she believes this can only be achieved through well-funded, independent journalism that includes the full diversity of voices. I can relate to her ideas because that’s exactly the aims and objectives of The Insider South Sudan.
Audience analysis and research are some of the things that I took for granted. Well, not anymore. Not when this duo exposed me to such a reliable method of researching our audience and determining their needs so that we can meet their demands without having to gamble.
Jeremy also provides tools through his newsletter and YouTube Channel that have simplified work for me since I joined the program. For example, before EJCP, taking notes was a tug of war, but after learning about new audio transcription tools such as the Otter, we have adopted the tool for our journalists to use in the newsroom to ease work as it transcribes sound quickly and more accurately irrespective of variation in accents.
Overall, we are going to form new partnerships and collaborate with like-minded media houses and organizations to achieve our goals in our long-term strategic business plan. Collaboration is a feature of journalism, especially in South Sudan where the press is constantly censored by the country’s brutal security operatives.
