Many, many changes ahead for The Daily Vox

    Our co-founder Khadija Patel has been appointed  as Editor-in-Chief of the Mail & Guardian.

    Patel takes up her new position on November 1.

    The Mail & Guardian and The Daily Vox are currently in talks about a proposed partnership that would see the team relocate to the M&G offices, while maintaining editorial independence and operational autonomy. The Daily Vox has already started interviewing candidates for Patel’s replacement as managing editor.

    “The Daily Vox is about a vision to radically transform journalism in South Africa, and it continues to show that it is possible to find new narratives even with scant resources,” Patel said, adding that The Daily Vox began as a vision she and Azad Essa shared for telling more inclusive stories about South Africa.

    Since its inception, that vision has been embraced by thousands of young South Africans.

    “The strength of The Daily Vox remains the young journalists who work with us, and the trust our audience have in us, to tell their stories accurately,” she said.

    Meanwhile, Azad Essa, co-founder of The Daily Vox, will also step down from his position as executive editor at the end of the month. In a statement, Essa, a senior writer at Al Jazeera English, said he was excited to see the project move to a new developmental phase.

    “The proposed partnership with the M&G will help it commercialise, and thrive, and I can finally breathe. I will remain a co-owner of The Daily Vox and a huge backer and believer in its potential to irritate,” he said.

    The Daily Vox was founded in June 2014 as an attempt to provide an alternate approach to news in South Africa. In September this year, The Daily Vox was awarded a silver prize in WAN-IFRA’s World Young Reader Prize in the public service category “for helping young people provide a counter-narrative to what was being reported in many mainstream publications about the #FeesMustFall campaign against rising university tuition charges”.

    The jury said: “This is a great example of a successful digital product launch on the wave of a national protest and widespread social change. It does the crucial job of giving voice to marginalised young people and portraying their view of the facts, something which many of the bigger news publishers often forget to do.”

    The Daily Vox, launched on 16 June 2014, is an independently funded news website focused on young South Africans. On average, the site receives 200,000 unique visitors per month with a further reach of 150,000 on social media.