Dear DM168 reader,

This month is my fourth anniversary at Daily Maverick. In May 2020, I started working on DM168, collaborating with the Daily Maverick team of online editors, journalists, advertising sales and reader revenue people and our art director, Kassie Naidoo, to conceptualise, plan and create a new quality national newspaper during the height of Covid.

Many thought our bosses, Daily Maverick owners Branko Brkic and Styli Charalambous, were as mad as a bag of snakes to start a newspaper when newspapers were shutting down all over the place and journalists were losing their jobs. The jury may be out on exactly how mad they are, but I am super glad and grateful that these two media visionaries trusted us and kept their faith in the need for a quality national weekly newspaper.

In my four years at Daily Maverick, I have realised that although I may not always have agreed with them, Brkic and Charalambous, more than most media owners I have worked for in my 36 years as a journalist, are not in this industry to chase profits before people. They put their entire beings and livelihoods on the line to keep the lights on for quality journalism in service of democracy and keeping South Africans informed. And they always have our backs as journalists.

In September 2020, we hit Pick ’n Pay’s shelves as a free broadsheet newspaper for Smart Shoppers, but we did not find enough advertisers to support our belief that quality journalism should be available free to all who want to know better and be better.

The first edition of DM168. (Photo:Leila Dougan)

A year later we pivoted to an advertising and cover price model to keep our newspaper going. Today, we sell the newspaper for R35 at all retail stores and on subscription to those who prefer home deliveries of their weekly read.

Because of the support of every one of you who buys our newspaper or as a DM Insider reads it as an e-edition online, I am super-chuffed to share that this week we learnt from the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) sales figures that DM168 is the only weekly newspaper to show year-on-year growth from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024.

2024 Quarter 1 ABC circulation of weekly newspapers

Please understand how incredible this is. While every other weekly newspaper is losing readers year-on-year, it is solely because of your support that we are going against the tide of doom and gloom for newspapers, and growing. We grew 8.6% from circulating 9,161 copies in the first quarter of 2023 to 10,823 copies in 2024.

Dear readers, give yourselves a fat round of applause. By buying our newspaper, you have helped us keep our jobs – creating your weekly time capsule of quality journalism you can trust. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for enabling us to keep serving you.

In keeping with the good feels, this week’s edition of DM168 is dedicated to the 28 million South Africans who registered to vote.

We will not tell you who to vote for, but we hope all of you will choose to vote for a party or independent candidate who will work tirelessly for the positive change we know we need in our country.

I firmly believe that if all of us who registered to vote head for the polls, together we can choose the kind of country we would like to live in and leave for the next generation. We did it in 1994 and we can do it 30 years later in 2024.

I am going to vote for a well-managed country run by able, dedicated, service- and solution-oriented, professional, skilled, compassionate civil servants who serve, protect, heal and teach – who actually live and breathe that slogan that we see in every government service point, from the dysfunctional Home Affairs office to the overcrowded public clinics and hospitals, to every school and police station.

The slogan is Batho Pele. It means simply “People First”. Not civil servants’ pockets first. Or politicians with blue lights first. Or rich people first. Or friends with tenders first. Or white or coloured or Indian or black people first. Just People First. If we vote for a party and candidates who put people first, it will give every citizen a chance to live a life of dignity and purpose.

I will not vote for any party that peddles lies, hatred, divisiveness, ignorance and fear to maintain an elite political and wealthy class in the lap of luxury while the poor drown in a sea of poverty and the working and middle classes barely keep afloat.

Please share your thoughts about what you voted for, not the party but what sort of country you voted for, and your voting experience by emailing [email protected] Please also send us pictures of you in the voting queue. I would love to see the faces of our readers and publish your pictures and anecdotes in next week’s paper. DM168 staff will share our voting pictures with you too.

This week’s newspaper is designed to be your voting friend to take along with you all the way to the queue at the voting station in your neighbourhood on 29 May. It’s a newspaper of hope, filled with stories of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans making a difference to our democracy.

Plus we have an easy-to-read guide that you can play as a game to help you decide what party to choose on V-day with our cut-out Manifesto Mayhem cards. Based on our associate editor Ferial Haffajee’s summaries of the manifestos of several of the main and minor parties that we published in DM168, our visual guru Bernard Kotze (who, like many voters, is bored to tears by the blah blah blah) designed these cards to make it fun and easy for you to figure out which party to vote for and which to avoid.

The cards remind me of the many Cluedo games I have lost to my 13-year-old son, a more adept detective than me. Who killed Democracy in SA? Was it Colonel Zuma in the kitchen with a dagger or Rev McKenzie in the lounge with a lead pipe? Find out by playing Manifesto Mayhem!

P.S. If you’re interested in taking out a home-delivery subscription, or if your paper has wandered off, please email our assistant publisher Delia Langenhoven at [email protected]

Yours in defence of truth and democracy,
Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.