Solidarity to Shared Infrastructure
Branko Brkic, Founder, Project Kontinuum and co-founder of Daily Maverick
Branko started Daily Maverick in 2009 with five people and turned it into one of South Africa’s most important newsrooms. In this session he argues that what happened to South African media in the 2010s is now happening everywhere. The big legacy players are still powerful, but slow. The platforms can switch publishers off overnight. And there has been no collective response.
His answer isn’t to fight big tech on scale, but to compete where independents can actually win. Media cannot play its role without technology serving it, and that means publishers and independent tech providers building it together. What started as an interview quickly became a debate, with Lucky Gunasekara of Miso, Ludovic Blecher of WhiteBeard and Ivan Massow joining in. They talked about why procurement treats partners as risks, why contracts take months, and why “vendor” may be the wrong word altogether.
Can publishers stop working against each other long enough to share infrastructure? What does a real partnership with independent tech look like? And who is going to plan beyond the next wave?
Candid, global and one of our best sessions yet.
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