https://zimbabwe.misa.org Impact of Covid 19 on Media Sustainability behind product design thinking and launching new products in a much more structured way that was going to de-risk and make them more successful, give them a greater chance of success at least.” No other news organisation in South Africa in the region, to my knowledge, has adopted the membership model, as advocated by the Membership Puzzle Project,118 in quite the same way. This is not to say that “membership” as a concept separate from subscription and involving more than a transactional relationship has not been practiced. The amaBhungane news organisation has for some time had individual supporters willing to donate to the non-profit investigative organisation, as well as foundational donors. AmaBhungane has a policy of capping donor funds to 20% of total operating expenditure, while aiming for 29% of operational spending to come from smaller public donations. It hit 26% in the most recent financial year.119 Realising that the organisation needed a clearer vision of revenue sources, they formulated the “326 formation” of revenue. This represents three main revenue streams, philanthropy, commercial activities, and reader revenue, and within each of those, two sub-streams. Charalambous notes that news organisations will have different revenue choices, but for the Daily Maverick, the sub-streams were, foundations and individuals under philanthropy, advertising and events under commercial activities, and under the membership programme, recurring support (as opposed to a subscription model) and once-off contributions.116 Recurring donations of R150 or more per month in terms of the Maverick Insider membership qualify donors to receive R100 back in UBER vouchers.117 The decision to launch a print edition was on the back of the membership programme. With 14 000 loyal members, Charalambous said, the Daily Maverick knew it had a good chance of achieving a circulation figure of 25 000, especially thanks to the innovative distribution model, a figure higher than titles with a 100-year history. “Membership has now become sort of the driving force behind so many of our initiatives and activities because it embodies two concepts that I think are important for publishers to adopt and to really lean into if they are to be sustainable. And that is datadriven audience-centricity.” Most resilient have been non-profit organisations. Professor Anton Harber has remarked on this surprising development: We are in the extraordinary position where philanthropically funded journalism appears to be more sustainable than the traditional advertising-driven model. This is an inversion of what we always accepted as reality. We are caught in a bind: we need citizens to value us enough to pay for our services in some form, but we don’t have the resources to produce the journalism that would show that value. We first have to recognise that this is a national and societal problem, not just a media one, and then we can tackle it.120 There is little doubt that at present the nonprofit model has produced and is producing extraordinary journalism in the region. And 116. Media Sustainability in Eastern and Southern Africa Webinar. 117. Daily Maverick Team, “Maverick Insider,” Daily Maverick, n.d, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/insider/. 118. “The Membership Puzzle Project,” The Membership Puzzle Project, accessed March 22, 2020, https://membershippuzzle.org. 119. Stefaans Brummer, amaBhungane, October 20, 2020. 120. Anton Harber, “Journalism Makes Blunders but Still Feeds Democracy: An Insider’s View,” The Conversation, September 17, 2020, http://theconversation.com/journalism-makes-blunders-but-still-feeds- democracy-an-insiders-view-146364. 33