Against a backdrop of growing unemployment, hunger, and violence, the South African communication landscape is shaped by our unjust history and world beating inequality. A handful of corporations control the dominant media and seek maximum profit at the expense of the information and expression needs of the marginalised majority. This results in a skewed public sphere unable to democratically confront thany challenges facing our democracy.
Shifting the public discourse to the left by including the marginalised majority and centering progressive voices and news items of impact/concern to the majority is critical to the peaceful resolution of South Africa’s structural crisis.
At the heart of this proposed intervention is a portal website & mobile app designed to serve as a ‘landing page’ for the marginalised majority, to aggregate the content produced by progressive media projects and organisations and build a demand-side economy of scale for progressive content that serves the human rights and social justice information and expression needs of the marginalised majority and vastly increase the reach – and hence impact – of progressive civil society in South Africa. The proposed objectives are:
- Deliver progressive content to a massive audience of the marginalised majority living in townships, informal settlements and rural areas across South Africa
- Promote rights ordinated and transformative content and services contributing to the impact of by progressive civil society and journalism organisations.
- Resource & promote active citizenship.
- Contributing to the development of a peoples internet, decommodified and free from commercial and state surveillance and censorship.
- Becoming self sustainable by selling advertising to value aligned organisations.
The portal’s content will include news & opinion as well as links to a variety of educational resources, the weather forecast, maps, and a searchable database of contacts for government and civil society bodies that offer the public reporting, advice, and counseling etc.
Promoting the use of the portal will be critical to achieving a demand side economy of scale. To do this we pay to advertise portal content on dominant platforms like Facebook, Google, SABC and News24. We’ll have email & mobile subscriptions options to send users daily or weekly ‘updates’, ensure content is search engine optimised, and nurture a network of progressive ‘influences’ – comrades with large social media followings – to share content on social media. News/options not already covered in the dominant media will be shared with journalists or op-ed editors encouraging them to cover the story/reproduce the opinion.
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