by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) How do you get young people to read and consume your content? By keeping it short, sharp and getting them to drive the content agenda.
But that sounds easier than it is in practice and many youth-orientated news products have failed in this country because they simply do not resonate with the audience.
Now the Daily Vox – which grew out of a youth-orientated website set up for last year’s general election called “South African Votes 2014” – is giving a voice to young South Africans and delivering it with online packaging savvy.
You’ll find listicles, vox pops, picture galleries, aggregated video and MP3s, opinion and bird’s-eye-view pieces on the site but the content is serious: the political economy, race relations and big news events such as the recent Rhodes statue saga and xenophobic violence
“You don’t have to dumb it down for young people,” Daily Vox managing editor Faranaaz Parker told Grubstreet. “They want to know what’s happening but you can’t write long. You need to tackle the story in short bites, especially if 60% of your readers are on mobile.
“It’s real journalism,” she says. “We try to keep it smart and we don’t talk down to our readers at all because they are smart people.”
This approach has helped the site reach an average 80 000 to 100 000 unique users a month in less than a year. Forty-two percent of readers are between the ages of 25 and 34 while 21% are between the ages of 18 and 35. Sixty percent are accessing the site via mobile.
Khadija Patel, one of the founders and executive editors of the site, told Grubstreet: “The election site was relatively successful for us and we received a lot of feedback from people who said: ‘You can’t let this die now’… So we decided to launch a more long-term project. ”
As with the vast majority of news websites in SA, Daily Vox is struggling with monetisation.
The Open Society Foundation, which was one of the funders of the election site, is still a Daily Vox funder and this
year the site stuck a syndication deal with SowetanLIVE to deliver content to it.
“It’s an exciting space but it’s also a very challenging space,” Patel says. “The SowetanLive revenue just about covers our expenses for the month, and for now that is sufficient for us. It gives us a position to be able to grow from as we obviously don’t want to be reliant on grant money.
“We’re not looking to make millions and billions of rands. We want it to be sustainable and we want it grow and to be able to hire more journalists and train more young journalists and reach more South Africans.”
Almost no one is fulltime at the Daily Vox – including Parker and Patel – and many of the reporters are journalism students.
It’s got a start-up vibe,” Parker says. “You check your mail in the morning and do work at 11pm and send SMS-es at two in the morning. We’re all very invested in it but it’s not fulltime.”
This means it is key for the reporters to maximise coverage of news events and slice and dice content so that the Daily Vox can get more than one post out of one event.
“We try to get them out to stories as much as possible,” says Parker. “It’s not always possible as they have lectures but when we do get them out, we look at: ‘What are you’re going to do? Can we get vox pops? How good are you with the camera? When you’re done can you write an opinion piece so we can get your perspective? And if it’s a really meaty topic can we get a feature out of this and explore it more?’”
Posts the do well at the Daily Vox involve politics, race, questions of inequality, she says.
“There is always that random internet meme that blows up so the readers do have a fun side but I think they’re very smart in that they don’t just read one post (on an issue). They’ll see what you’re saying and then they’ll go see what the Sowetan is saying and the Mail & Guardian, and compare and figure things out for themselves. And that’s not a bad thing. I think everyone wins.”
Because the reporters are mostly students, stories need active news editing, says Parker, and she and assistant editor Theresa Mallinson work closely together on this.
Parker would love to bring in new reporters from areas such as Limpopo and the Eastern Cape but money won’t allow for this at the moment.
“We want stories that people don’t hear about enough and from parts of the country that people don’t hear about enough.”
A big part of the Daily Vox is mentoring the young reporters, she says, and effort is put into getting them to drive the content agenda.
“Our biggest asset is our young reporters – and that’s where we have a bit of a niche. We’re always asking them: ‘What do your friends think? What do your families say? What are the people you know talking about? Let’s do a story on that.’”
Patel says: “Many young people in South Africa feel very disconnected from the political spectacle and the mainstream media doesn’t particularly speak to them so this is our challenge: to try to package stuff differently to reach that audience and make them feel like they are involved, and to include them consciously as well.”
She believes that contrary to popular perception that Generation Y is a shallow, tech-obsessed group, they are actually very engaged with their worlds.
“They don’t express it in ways that we expect. They are very interested in what is happening and very opinionated about politics. They have convictions.
“We want to reflect the experience of South Africans – to amplify the political spectacle in a way that is not usually described in traditional media. We are amplifying the individual human experience of South Africa because it goes a long way to telling a bigger story – and it makes for easier reading rather than having a text-heavy 800-word piece that is really well written but is not very readable for this generation.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet with Biznews.
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