Case stories

Founded in 1985 as The Weekly Mail, Mail & Guardian was the first South African daily to turn its back on racial allegiance in its selection and coverage of news. It was also one of the first publications to discuss “fringe” issues such as homosexuality in apartheid South Africa. Since then, M&G has become widely known and respected as a beacon of investigative journalism.

Ten years ago, Mike Daka quit his job as Director of the Zambia Institute of Mass Communication, the country’s leading media training centre, and moved his family to Zambia’s Eastern Province to set up Radio Breeze. An unusual step? Perhaps. But Mike had a burning ambition to establish a financially sustainable rural radio station with a mission.

Launched in 1999 by two dedicated journalists seeking to provide an alternative to the all-pervasive pro-establishment media, for many years it was the sole independent news source in the country. Today, it is Malaysia’s most important – and most read – news website.

After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, Santoso and a small group of journalist colleagues were looking for a way to end the state’s 30-year grip on news. They wanted to find a way to provide quality information and opinion to some of Indonesia’s 18,000 islands. Find out how they opened Indonesia to the world.

The launch of NewsDay in June 2010 was a landmark in Zimbabwe’s recent history: it ended President Robert Mugabe’s seven-year control of daily news. With the appearance of NewsDay, for the first time since 2003 Zimbabweans had daily access to an alternative, objective source of news.