GroundUp: News That Matters

GroundUp’s work is, first and foremost, informed by the South African Constitution, which gives people the rights to housing, education, health, safety, justice, food and dignity. Our articles show what these rights mean in daily life. 

We aim to ensure more people in South Africa have their Constitutional rights realised. To do this, we publish human rights news that is free to read and republish. By putting these stories in the public domain, we hold government to account and amplify the voices of people in underreported communities. 

We also break big stories, like Thabo Bester’s daring prison escape, massive corruption at PRASA, and gross misspending of Lottery funds meant for good causes.

Reporting the law: Well-run courts, whose judgments are widely understood, are essential to realising human rights. We run regular in-depth reports on important human rights judgments. But they’re written to be understood by non-lawyers.

We hold judges to account: While we respect the judiciary, we are not in awe of judges. We expose judges who behave badly, deliver judgments late or abuse their positions.       

We value high-quality, ethical journalism. Our journalists have won numerous awards, including the prestigious 2023 Nat Nakasa Award for Media Integrity for our work exposing Bester’s escape, and the 2022 Vodacom Journalist of the Year (Raymond Joseph) for our Lottery corruption investigations.  

News in the age of commentary: Commentary is cheap. News isn’t. While we do publish some commentary, we treasure news reporting because, without it, commentary is useless. We publish well over one thousand original news articles a year.

GroundUp does not publish pseudoscience (such as AIDS denialism, climate change denialism, vaccination denialism) or bigotry (such as racism, sexism and homophobia).

Our story

With dwindling budgets, newsrooms across the country are shrinking, and the stories of everyday South Africans and their struggles get lost. GroundUp was founded to fill that gap by focusing on these stories and providing them for free to bigger news publications. GroundUp started in April 2012 as a joint project of Community Media Trust and the University of Cape Town's Centre for Social Science Research. 

In June 2020, we became a standalone non-profit company (Registration: 254-625-NPO). 

We focus on producing news, and we want our stories to be read everywhere by as many people as possible with minimal distraction, unencumbered by adverts and commercial interests. This is why we publish under a Creative Commons licence: our articles are free to republish. 

Who are our reporters? We have a team of staff and freelance reporters. Many of them live in townships or come from informal settlements, and it is life here that they write about. They have a deep understanding of the areas they report on.

In an era of shrinking newsrooms, few opportunities exist for young reporters to receive training and support. GroundUp has an intensive editing process that produces high-quality articles for publication, but also helps our reporters to improve.

Who funds us? GroundUp is a South African registered not-for-profit company. We rely solely on donations to do our work. We don’t run ads and our articles are free to read. 

GroundUp is independent. We do not promote any political party or agendas of our donors. 

Much of our funding is from institutional donors. But we need more of our readers to support us. Our readers give anything from once-off R20 donations to R10,000 every year.

Resources

GroundUp displays the “FAIR” stamp of the Press Council of South Africa on all our web pages, indicating our commitment to adhere to the Code of Ethics for Print and Online Media which prescribes that our reportage is truthful, accurate and fair. Should you wish to lodge a complaint about our news coverage, please lodge a complaint on the Press Council’s website, www.presscouncil.org.za or email the complaint to enquiries@ombudsman.org.za. Contact the Press Council on 011 4843612.