Out of all the hundreds of articles, reports, and projects I worked on, I think this is the most difficult one I’ve ever had to write.
Last Friday, we announced that we are not in a position to produce NEWZWEEK for the foreseeable future. I am reproducing a screenshot of the post below in case you haven’t seen it.
As promised in that post, Michael Kaden and I – the two journalists who produced NEWZWEEK, NEWZ MILL-QORTI, SIEGĦA, and Untangling the Mafia State – followed through with a lengthy strategic review of our operations last Friday.
Our plan is to extend the fundraiser by another three weeks. If we manage to achieve our minimum target of €20,000, we will be able to implement our strategy and hopefully turn our collaboration around. Without that target, we are effectively dead in the water.
Though it goes without saying, we feel compelled to point out that we will be giving this everything we’ve got. We will be pursuing every avenue of support at our disposal and won’t stop until we’ve exhausted every possibility.
It would not be fair of us to ask you to provide that support without providing a clear path forward. So, we are sharing our conclusions with you and asking you to help us bring our goals to life while we are at it.
Every single euro that is donated to our current campaign will go directly towards our collaborative productions.
Whatever happens, we are proud of what we achieved. We dared to do the kind of journalism that others couldn’t even conceive in their wildest fantasies. Though that came at a terrible personal cost, it was worth every second of our time.
To those precious few souls who already began contributing without even hearing our pitch, we thank you for your incredible show of generosity. The last few days have been difficult to come to terms with and your faith in our projects gives us some sorely needed encouragement.
Our shows
A screenshot from our best-performing show: NEWZ MILL-QORTI.
Our court reporting was evidently our best content to date.
NEWZ MILL-QORTI consistently performs well, providing a unique service by summarising complex corruption cases for the benefit of the public’s understanding. When factoring in our live reporting, each episode takes anywhere between 12 – 20 working hours to produce.
We feel that this content format merits expansion. To date, our court reporting focused solely on the hospitals case. If we manage to obtain enough funding to continue our work, we will broaden our reporting to include other major organised crime and corruption cases which deserve our attention.
A screenshot from our latest show: NEWZWEEK.
NEWZWEEK is our most ambitious format to date.
It is a 25 – 30 minute weekly show which involves a mixture of analysis, commentary, and original features. Given that we’ve only published three episodes, we figured we do not have enough data to make a conclusive call about its future.
We’ll be the first to admit that this show had its fair share of technical hitches. It is the equivalent of a news bulletin with a few defining personal touches, with the real difference being that there is no newsroom and no technical staff behind our show. It’s just two people working their asses off all week to deliver a product that can compete with anything like it on the market.
We nonetheless believe there is value in the struggle of refining this product’s formula and are committed to continue doing so.
If we hit our fundraising goals, we will extend this show for three months and then reassess when we have a better understanding of what our followers make of it.
A screenshot from our interview show: SIEGĦA.
Out of all the hours spent discussing our shows, SIEGĦA was the most difficult part of the conversation.
SIEGĦA is an hour-long interview show in which we’ve spoken to various influential figures in the sphere of civil society.
This show was the starting point of our collaborative work way back in April of this year. For us, it was a joy to produce. It was our way of shining a spotlight on individuals whose work, for better or for worse, merited an hour’s worth of scrutiny.
While we thoroughly enjoyed every minute spent on producing these interviews, we’ve been forced to come to terms with the brutal logic of cost efficiency. Per episode, it is simply too resource-intensive and requires a much broader following for it to be feasible.
So, we’ve decided to end this show and replace it with a new format focused on holding political representatives accountable.
Given that we do not want to telegraph our every move in advance, we will be holding our cards close to our chest on this one for the time being. We can certainly promise that there will be fireworks.
Together, we can build something incredible, a project that could redefine the definition of what it means to truly deliver the news without fear or favour.
We have eighteen days to pull this off – we’re counting on you.