For years, journalists and newsrooms in Sri Lanka have had to navigate a host of problems. Media capture, repression, and unsustainable business models have been all too common – and impunity for violence against journalists remains a longstanding issue.
“Journalism is still in danger,” Reporters Without Borders notes, and “the media landscape lacks diversity, is highly concentrated, and dependant on major political clans.”
Enter The Examiner. Launched in September by a team of three, the brand new outlet employs a digital model focused on subscriptions. They currently receive no money from advertising and are committed to maintaining their editorial independence. “You, dear subscriber, pay our bills,” reads the website.
I got in touch with journalist and CEO Daniel Alphonsus, who is based in Colombo, to learn more about what this exciting new initiative has in store.
Here’s our conversation.
What does everybody need to know about The Examiner?
The Examiner is reversing the decline of Sri Lanka's print media. We're the island’s first subscription-based digital newspaper, publishing weekly on anything and everything to do with Sri Lanka. Our primary focus is getting the facts straight, seeing the island from fresh angles, and writing in a way that's pleasurable to read.
For years, we saw newspapers closing up as advertising revenues were taken over by Meta, Google and Bytedance. The newspaper business model was torn to shreds. Newspapers were forced to chase eyeballs, and standards in terms of reporting, writing, and ethics declined. Newspapers came to be filled with outrageous lies, sycophancy, and impenetrable writing.
Donations, training and other forms of capacity building were all helpful; but they only helped at the margins. They didn't address the core problem of finding a sustainable business model. Newspapers knew they had to adapt to a new reality. But until the last couple of years, how exactly they should adapt was not clear.
In the last few years, we've seen something of a renaissance in text media, both in terms of large global platforms like the New York Times and the Financial Times, but also in terms of very niche, specialist publications, often driven via the Substack ecosystem. I suspect over the coming years, hyperlocal and independent publications like The Examiner are also going to thrive.
Do you have a target audience or ideal reader?
Our target reader is someone who is deeply curious about Sri Lanka and wants to both know and understand what's really going on in the island. Ideally, not only its politics or its economics, or its culture, but the entirety of human experience on the island. Or to put it slightly differently, what's going on in the island, why it's happening, where are we coming from and where are we going?
What are the main challenges associated with starting a new media outlet?
One of the biggest challenges The Examiner faced is the lack of models in our market. Because we are effectively creating a new market – a subscription-based newspaper model for Sri Lanka – there wasn't a clear and beaten path for us to follow. We have to learn and invent things on the fly.
Another is obviously funding. The closest thing we have to an office is [fellow co-founder] Mimi [Alphonsus]'s sitting room. Or when an Airbnb I let out doesn't have guests, that's our office. The only way we're able to survive until we reach the break-even point is because we've worked corporate jobs and put money aside.
Surprisingly, the biggest problem we are trying to solve is figuring out how to get people above the age of 35 to subscribe. The Examiner’s had tremendous encouragement from all age groups. However, in terms of actually converting to subscriptions, especially considering the purchasing power older people command, it's a much harder challenge to get them to subscribe. I guess it's because their kids have set up their Netflix subscriptions for them.
In terms of subscription rates, how did you figure out what to charge?
We were very aware that this would be the first time our readers would be subscribing online, for something that wasn’t Netflix or Spotify. Therefore, we worked very hard to reduce the barriers in terms of price, in terms of user experience, and in terms of trust.
The conversation was, "What's the cost of a coffee, let's make sure we’re cheaper than that” and “How long does it take to order a coffee, subscribing must be faster and easier than that.” That’s what we’ve done.
Also in terms of pricing, there are two ways of making the same amount of money. The first is to have a few subscribers but charge them a lot. The second is to have many subscribers but charge them a little. We wanted people to read what we wrote. Therefore, from the outset, we chose to charge a little and have many subscribers.
Also you’ll notice that we have differential pricing for people on the island [$1 per month] and outside the island [$3 per month]. We can have a very sophisticated conversation about price discrimination and cohort segmentation. But really, it's about making sure we are cheaper than a coffee wherever our reader is buying coffee.
How would you describe Sri Lanka’s media environment today?
This is probably one of the best moments to be a journalist in Lanka in decades. At this very precise moment in time, journalists have relatively little fear of the state. However, that said, there are substantial institutional barriers to journalism. The Online Safety Act is a shadow that looms over all that we do.
And of course in the north and east, the situation remains quite different. Journalists there face a significantly more hazardous and challenging media environment, subject to both intimidation by some agents of the state and a relative lack of law and order.
How did you and the two other members of The Examiner’s founding team first come together?
I worked in FinTech for nearly five years, and while some of the problems were quite interesting, I felt it was time to get back to solving the problems that really engaged me. Along with the civil service, the media is the weakest in the chain of institutions that constitute Sri Lanka's polity, so it was an obvious candidate. It also suited my slightly peripatetic intellectual interests. And it was an area where my startup experience could also come in handy. Hence, The Examiner.
Meanwhile, my sister [Mimi Alphonsus] was working as a journalist earning less than $200 a month for a full-time job. This was not sustainable after a couple of years. There's no way she could rent a flat and pay her bills. So while we have fundamentally diverging political views and, in many ways, approaches to life, we also saw the complementarity of her journalistic experience with my business and policy experiences. And, of course, the fact that there was a high degree of trust between us as siblings.
And there's no way you can start a newspaper with just two people. Even with three it's a herculean challenge. But thanks to Pamodi [Waravita], who is a friend of Mimi’s, we've been able to. [Pamodi has] worked the longest in journalism and has experience at global houses like The New York Times, which set the industry standard. She plays a central role in how we think, our structure and processes, and is the person we turn to when we are trying to figure out how to handle a knotty journalistic problem.
What does success for you and The Examiner look like?
At the moment, survival is our only north star. Thanks to the support and encouragement we’ve had so far, I have every reason to think we will.
So let’s get on to what success will look like for us in five years' time. If there were one metric I would pick, it would be that journalists get paid roughly as much as an academic, a corporate executive, or a civil servant of equivalent rank.
You can't attract people into the field, you can’t attract high-quality people into the field, without solving the pay problem. If that is solved, then you can sustainably deliver high-quality reporting at scale.
Paying properly demands a workable business model. If we can prove that subscriptions are that model, then I think The Examiner would have succeeded.
This interview has been edited lightly.
Main image courtesy of The Examiner.
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