Brave or stupid? One year later, here’s the answer

What one year of The Debrief Network has been like

A year ago, at the beginning of April, I wrote a column titled This is either brave or stupid.

It was the moment The Debrief Network had just launched, and I was trying to make sense of what we were attempting to build.

At the time, I described it as a selfish project. I wrote that The Debrief Network was created out of a desire to pioneer the future of journalism, to build a learning platform that could train the next generation of journalists, and to create a home for the kind of storytelling I had always wanted to do.

A year later, I find myself returning to that framing. Not because I now have a neat answer, but because the question still lingers.

Was it brave, or was it simply naïve? The honest answer is that it was both.

Because the past year was a messy, often exhausting reality of building something from scratch.

It has meant training young reporters who had never worked in a newsroom before, while simultaneously trying to understand the demands of social storytelling.

It has meant experimenting with formats, chasing a viable financial model, and constantly trying to stay afloat in an industry that is itself in flux.

Trying to get financial support for journalism has been harder than I thought.

Somewhere in that process, the year passed in a blur.

Throughout this time, I have held onto one idea with almost stubborn conviction. We are not reinventing journalism. The principles remain the same. What we are changing is the vehicle and the medium through which journalism is delivered.

That distinction matters, because innovation in journalism is often mistaken for abandoning its core.

What we are trying to do is the opposite. We are trying to preserve those core principles by adapting them to a different environment.

So what does a year of that effort actually amount to? There have been many, many wins.

We produce as much social video content as some of the biggest newsroom in South Africa.

Over the past year, we trained ten news creators who arrived with no journalistic experience and left with the ability to find stories, pitch them, script them, shoot them, edit them and produce them for social platforms.

We reported from countries including Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania and Madagascar, expanding our reach beyond South Africa while also strengthening our national footprint through grassroots reporting from across the country.

We built a daily good news stream that has grown into a consistent and credible offering, one that reminds audiences that journalism does not only have to document crisis.

Our reporting has had impact in real people’s lives.

We also experimented with long-form storytelling through shows such as Mind Your Business, The Debrief with Qaanitah Hunter and Africa Explained.

We also launched Debrief Labs- our offices and studios- as a creative space to expand how we tell stories.

Beyond our own newsroom, we trained more than a dozen newsrooms across South Africa, sharing what we have learned in real time.

We presented our work at three international conferences, rebranded the platform, grew our audience, invested in a stronger team and formalised our commitment to ethical journalism by subscribing to the Press Council.

There are many other wins too. But the setbacks have been just as real.

We have struggled with limited reach on TikTok due to what appears to be shadow banning on the platform. This has constrained growth in a space that is central to how audiences consume news.

More fundamentally, real journalism is expensive. And we have not yet secured the partnerships needed to sustainably fund the kind of journalism we believe in.

We have tried, we have succeeded, we have stumbled, we have failed, and we have had to pivot, often more than once.

So the reality is that this has been a difficult but rewarding year.

Last year, I wrote that the road ahead would be hard, and that I was prepared to take the risk and share what I learned along the way.

I also wrote that if we succeeded, we would be laying the groundwork for the future of journalism, and if we failed, we would at least be able to teach others what not to do. Either way, I argued, journalism would win.

One year in, I can say this with more certainty than I could then.

Journalism is already winning.

It is winning because we have not compromised on our commitment to facts over virality. It is winning because we have shown that there is space, and demand, for credible storytelling in a fragmented and often chaotic media environment.

And it is winning because The Debrief Network is no longer just an idea. It is a robust young newsroom that is beginning to shape conversations, experiment with form, and build a community.

We are, in our own way, already disrupting the media landscape. We are contributing to how the future of storytelling is being defined. And we are building something that grows, steadily, every day.

Our ambitious plans for the year ahead are equally fun and scary. I won’t list it here but you will want to be along for this ride.

Thank you for being on this journey with us. We love having you here.