My writing voice has become somewhat bleak as of late. You may have also noticed a decline in the frequency with which I write. The two are interlinked and mandate an explanation, in particular to those of you who have contributed to supporting this project.
If you follow my work, you are probably aware that the future of this website depends entirely on public fundraising. Two and a half weeks ago, I published a progress update about a fundraising campaign held in collaboration with NEWZ.mt. That fundraising campaign ends tomorrow, which gives me the opportunity to speak about this with some sense of finality. For context, here’s a screenshot of the final figure.
A screenshot of our fundraiser campaign’s final count as of 19 December, 2024.
Given that I’ve also received a steady trickle of donations through this website’s PayPal account, the total number of people who donated either to the website or the fundraising campaign amounts to just shy of a hundred since the website was set up.
Throughout the past twelve months, this website had an audience of 53,000 active users with a total of 128,000 page views. That means that less than 0.2% of the total number of users decided to donate money to support this project. For the sake of context, 53,000 active users equals roughly 10% of the country’s population.
A screenshot of this website’s analytics for the past twelve months. Source: Google Analytics
To be clear, I am not publishing these numbers to pontificate about people not wanting to pay for journalism. I said more than enough about why public funding for journalism is crucial. Since day one, I’ve always said that my goal was to create an irreverent, bulletproof brand of journalism that is entirely accountable to readers, and that if the public rejects it, then so be it.
I am certainly not publishing my user numbers to brag, either. A national newsroom can get that amount of page views within a 24-hour cycle, so I am under no delusion I’ve achieved some major milestone.
What I can say is that, in spite of the overwhelming odds against this project, the needle did move. We didn’t shake the earth – but there was a slight tremor. The public’s response to this website’s work cannot be classified as a rejection. In fact, its community of supporters endorses it wholeheartedly. The issue lies in scaling the project to a national level, and we are clearly not quite there yet.
As for my peers in the press, well – they weren’t laying rose petals in anticipation of my arrival, either. To date, the only newsrooms that have ever acknowledged our existence by reporting our investigations or promoting our work are Newsbook and The Maltese Herald.
Everyone else quietly reads our work and says nothing about it. Some have outright refused to work with us on specific projects which, ironically, would have granted them a platform to amplify their own work. But, whether they like it or not, I have a seat at the table, and nobody gets to say otherwise.
The only reason I am publishing these numbers is to give everyone a clear picture before announcing any future decisions about this website.
At the moment, I am in no position to do that. I do not have the answers which I myself desperately need to figure out the way forward.
There is only so much one individual can endure and it has come to the point where the sacrifice required to sustain this project on a professional level impinges on the most basic aspects of my well-being. Though I went into this with no expectations, I definitely went into it with a lot of hope that people would recognise the genuine nature of my endeavours and contribute once the use case has been proven to them.
Knowing that this didn’t happen as much as I would have liked it to is, quite frankly, a whole load of stress to process, a task which I am yet to fully complete.
Fact number one is that in spite of my very best efforts, less than 0.2% of this website’s audience over the past twelve months felt that rewarding those efforts with enough money to sustain them was a worthy investment.
Fact number two is that this website’s unparalleled independence from commercial and state-owned interests is directly proportional to how many people make that same call.
Fact number three is that not enough people made that call, and so, here I am at 3.45am on a Thursday, grappling with the ramifications of all that.
I hope to have those answers soon. But I’d be lying if I said that all this hasn’t affected me in a way which makes me want to quit the profession entirely. I love the work I do and I will chase a good story to the ends of the earth if I have to.
The problem is that it seems I have exhausted my abilities and still find myself far short of where I hoped to be by now.
The problem is that I had to spend weeks calling people to ask them for their hard-earned money when I should be spending my time chasing down politicians who have robbed our country blind.
In spite of all this, I find it incredibly comforting to know that some of you did dream the same dream. Some of you had enough faith in this project to fund it, even though you were all aware that it is an entirely untested experiment that would not be looked upon kindly by the powers that be.
Some of you understood the theoretical vision behind this project and gave it a fighting chance. I am eternally grateful to each and every single one of you, and intend to repay you by seeing this through somehow. Unless a miracle manifests itself in time for Christmas, this website’s footprint will probably have to shrink, but I promise to not let it wither entirely.
For now, I need to rest, recover, and figure out whether there is a way to keep my journalistic projects alive.
I hope the rest of the year brings you all some joy and respite in these trying times.