We are now in our 10th year at Michael West Media and would like to thank the community for your support of independent journalism. Without you, this could not have happened.
This missive is to outline our bona fides, our business model and our plans for the future, and ask for your help on that journey. Together, we can grow this thing, shake up Australia’s media scene and keep the pressure on the institutions of power – this for a better future for us all.
We rarely ‘put the hat around’, but we believe there is a powerful public interest case for building independent media. First things first, though. MWM has paid dozens of journalists for their work, and we have put five young journalists through our (admittedly ad hoc) cadetship program, as well as providing work experience to many others.
Two of these young journalists are Stephanie Tran and Josh Barnett. Steph has returned to journalism from the law, and Josh has come out of the music industry and runs the YouTube and Instagram side of the business. We need to engage them full-time. This alone will make a huge difference to MWM output.
Unlike other media, we teach young journalists how to read a balance sheet, do a corporate search, and follow the money. We tend progressive, but we have no political or corporate backing or agendas. We believe in evidence-based journalism. But there is a cost. We are happy to look at individual sponsorships or the community tipping in what they can, or even corporate solutions (with no editorial control).
MWM produces traffic over all the platforms – this website, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and X – of around 750k in audience a month. We can expand this substantially by delivering more high-quality content. A significant injection of capital, and engaging a few of Australia’s top journalists, would take us into the millions a month and transform the nation’s media. That is one option.
In the meantime, we simply need support to pay our team properly for the work they already do – that’s FOI legend and former senator Rex Patrick, finance guru Michael Pascoe, our freelance team Harry Chemay, Wendy Bacon, Zach Szumer, Yaakov Aharon, Andrew Gardiner, Michael Sainsbury and many, many other contributors.
Then there is Kim Wingerei, MWM’s publisher and jack-of-all-trades of the web and our business, and myself (out of pure necessity – these workers come cheap).
Before we get to the business model and avenues for growth, let’s address the basic questions: “Why would we support you? Do you deserve it? What will it achieve?”
A track record you can support
It was this month nine years ago, with yours truly as a refugee from corporate media, that we published our first story, Oligarchs of the Treasure Islands. There have been over five thousand since, many of which have shaped the course of politics and business in this country. Multinationals now pay more tax. We have broken stories globally, as these citations in the Wall St Journal and FT demonstrate.
The forensic work done by our reporters has been instrumental in axing the Billionaire Loophole, in exposing and junking privatisations, such as the sell-off of public assets, including the Visa processing system and the corporate regulator’s database. Readers’ funding has saved Australia billions of dollars from being funnelled offshore through multinational tax avoidance.
We have been ahead of the game on so many public interest issues, ranging from political donations and lobbying to the murky practices of the Big Four consultants, Big Sugar, money laundering and pokies, the Big Four banks, Qantas, the Israel lobby, the NACC, AUKUS, defence procurement debacles, failed housing policy and superannuation.
We don’t always get it 100% right, who does? We welcome criticism, but we are dogged in acting without agendas and producing fearless journalism.
And we have lost some skin financially over the years, deserted by a few supporters of Labor when the present government came to power (we are not here to write press releases for one tribe or another) and Israel supporters post October 7 2023, due to our coverage of Gaza.
Our business model
At its heart, our business model is quite simple. We produce and commission public interest stories and publish them on the MWM website. We then distribute this content via social media posts across all the platforms. Audience growth and retention swings from year to year. Facebook used to be the biggest generator of traffic, but there have been censorship issues there (and elsewhere).
YouTube has delivered the biggest growth for the past couple of years. X has gone nowhere since Elon Musk took it over (the ‘algo’ does not favour other publishers). All this waxes and wanes, but we remain committed to being nimble, and with AI hitting, things may even become more volatile as the media further transforms.
The software, infrastructure and online security costs are ever rising; we see tens of thousands of hacking attempts every month. But the bulk of the costs are in paying human beings for their work. Australia’s draconian defamation laws and the failure of regulation of the legal system are both big issues for us. We have endured two vexatious lawsuits over the past five years, which have been draining in both cost and money.
The company has never paid out or apologised in a legal settlement, but nine years of regularly being threatened by ambulance-chasing lawyers is costly. We particularly thank those supporters who have come to our rescue when we have been forced to pay for defence lawyers.
Corporate and community options for growth
With the present level of funding, battling lawyers, commissioning and paying for content, and editing and producing that content, we only have the resources to pursue a handful of leads and deliver 5-10 stories a week.
We pay AAP for national news because AAP is a no-frills, no-agenda, independent news reporting operation. This is a service we offer for readers on top of our own offering.
We do not carry advertising (except Youtube which is small despite 200k to 300k audience a month). We have had to expand into visual media because some people like to read and others like to watch or listen. The production costs are significant but we don’t have the resources to do enough interviews as too much time is expended in investigations, commissioning and simply churning out the content.
We are also planning to revamp our podcast offerings, using AI to keep the costs down, but it’s still not cheap.
We have no dedicated editor, so time is our most precious commodity.
What’s next?
The opportunities for growth, however, abound amid the continued challenges facing the legacy media, which is ever more beholden to its political and corporate patrons – ergo compromised.
One way for us to grow is to garner significantly more community support, in addition to the roughly 4,000 supporters who presently fund the operation. We can do this slowly, but not without far more support in the community, which is a chicken-and-egg situation, because this would entail generating a lot more content.
So it is that we also plan to explore corporate options. We have the track record and are therefore well placed to lead a transformation of the media market. If, for instance, we were to hire five of the top journalists in the country, our traffic would immediately rise to millions of people a month.
This is because top journalists mostly have their own distribution channels and readership already. If they were to operate in an environment with no corporate or political agendas, MWM that is, their audience would growth further.
Collectively, this traffic would compel the large institutions of business and media to engage. Increased traffic on the website would make it a must-view destination. A transformation of Australia’s media, in the public interest, no marketing needed. We would also require some funds to pay for an editor and production staff.
We are not fussy about names or branding or growth for the sake of growth. The eye must remain on the ball, quality, fearless, and independent coverage.
Whatever the outcome of this pitch, we expect to keep growing. And we thank those deeply who have helped us to make it this far. Onwards and upwards!
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.