First published on Daily Maverick 168

As a Maverick Insider, I thought I could use this chat to convince the editor-in-chief to explore a Daily Maverick phone app. The coffee meeting turned out to be something completely different, counter-intuitive in fact. It was an invitation for me to edit the newspaper you have in your hands. Resistance was futile, I was being lured back to the future. 

Five years before, I had walked away from a job as a newspaper editor and the stress of trying my best to serve readers with quality information while Google and Facebook chowed up the advertising that subsidised the news. I had had enough of media owners squeezing the last drop of profit, fighting fake media wars on their front pages, while dedicated and committed journalists, friends and warriors for truth and justice, lost their jobs and livelihoods as newsrooms shrunk like a very bad wash at the laundry.

When the space-time traveller called me, I was happily ensconced at the digital social justice NPO amandla.mobi. Yet, here I am. Back to the future aboard Starship Daily Maverick, up all day and night pursuing a 168 hours a week mission to serve quality journalism that will hopefully enrich readers’ knowledge and understanding of this country and the world we live in. 

So why am I here, pushing the sun, with a team of creative designers and sub-editors packaging the hard work of Daily Maverick’s journalists? It’s actually quite simple. They are fallible and crazily human like me, like us, but the space-time continuum traveller,  his sidekick Styli Charalambous (a certified bean counter with the soul of a poet, the mind of a data analytics machine and a stomach of steel) and the exceptionally talented crew on Starship Daily Maverick, are as passionate about the fate and future of the public interest role of journalism as I am. The kind of journalism that not just breaks the latest scandal or investigation, but explains significant events.

It’s a mission-and-a-half, I know. You may think it utter madness. Or maybe not. While reading these 32 pages of broadsheet and 16 pages of tabloid you might find something that gets you thinking a bit deeper, understanding a bit more or laughing at the absurdity of it all. 

This pilot edition of Daily Maverick 168, the newspaper platform of Starship Daily Maverick, which will be published weekly from 26 September, is our humble effort to curate the best of your Daily Maverick online and more to serve you, our readers with quality journalism you can trust. As this newspaper is as much yours as it is ours, I invite you to help us shape and craft it into a product that you are proud to have in your hands by giving us feedback and telling us what you think we could do to improve by writing an email to [email protected]  and filling in this reader survey. With you as fellow space-time travellers, Daily Maverick 168 will launch into a future we all can believe in. DM168