This week marks the 10th birthday of one of Australia’s leading independent news websites, The New Daily.
Respected media veteran, Bruce Guthrie and industry superannuation pioneer, Garry Weaven conceived the idea for The New Daily in 2011 during a period of great tumult for the Australian media industry. As traditional media scrambled to keep up with the massive digital transformation underway, Guthrie and Weaven saw an opportunity to provide the public with a new, free, and independent online voice they could trust.
To help bring their idea to life, Guthrie and Weaven teamed up with Paul Hamra, Solstice Media CEO and current managing director of The New Daily, and Private Media Chair Eric Beecher, and in 2013 The New Daily was born.
Over the past decade, The New Daily has become a significant news site and today sits among Australia’s top 15 news sources—serving almost 430,000 highly-engaged subscribers daily and boasting 1.35-million unique users per month. The New Daily is a household name to hundreds-of-thousands of readers who rely on its morning email for their first take on the important news and opinion of the day.
“I’m proud we’ve become part of the media conversation and landscape, which is no small achievement given how many competitors have come and gone over the past ten years. A major plank in the design of The New Daily had to be independent news coverage that the public could trust. This is why we wrote a charter of editorial independence that remains one of our guiding principles,” said Guthrie.
The news site features some of Australia’s most respected experts and journalists, including Alan Kohler, Michael Pascoe, Paul Bongiorno, Julia Banks, Simon Kuestenmacher, Madonna King, and Kirstie Clements. It has also been accoladed for its journalistic success. Samantha Maiden won a Walkley Award for her scoop on then Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Hawaii trip during the 2020 bushfires, and Michael Pascoe’s reporting on the Robo Debt scandal and Lucie Morris-Marr’s coverage of George Pell’s landmark trial also won awards.
The New Daily was initially launched with a unique ownership and funding model backed by foundation investors AustralianSuper, Cbus, First Super, HESTA, LUCRF and Industry Super Holdings. It also relied on revenue from advertising on the site. As a result of successfully growing its audience and revenue overtime, The New Daily is approximately 75 per cent self-sufficient today.
From the outset, Weaven knew the publication could deliver important benefits to super-fund members, as well as the general reading public, “A key issue for me was to make sure we covered superannuation and investment themes and an important part of that was to fairly report on the performance of the growing industry-fund movement, which wasn’t happening at the time.”
To celebrate 10 years of independent reporting, The New Daily will release a suite of engaging content in digital and video format including a series of reports by The New Daily Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher on what the next 10 years will look like for Australia.
