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Editorial announcement（https://cap.mt/category/editorial-announcement/）

The people have spoken

By Julian Delia（https://cap.mt/author/julian/） September 9, 2025 One Comment（https://cap.mt/2025/09/09/the-people-have-spoken/#comments） 7 min read

Home（https://cap.mt/） » News（https://cap.mt/news/） » The people have spoken

I’ve always said that this website will continue to thrive for as long as people want it to.

While I earnestly hoped it wouldn’t come to this, it’s now clear beyond any shadow of a doubt: this is not the kind of journalism Malta wants.

For the past three years, I did everything I reasonably could to bring this vision to life. A fully independent outlet that takes no prisoners.

In its entire lifetime, this weird, wild experiment that pushed just about every boundary in Malta’s media landscape reached 84,000 unique users. Across all platforms, we’ve accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.

Of course, these are rookie numbers in this racket. Nonetheless, the fact is that all of the work you see on this website was largely done by one guy with a laptop and a camera, along with a few collaborations with like-minded people who came and went. Comparing me with a corporate newsroom is like comparing your local monti with Amazon.

For a while（https://cap.mt/2025/05/26/live-from-the-bottom-of-the-pit/） , it seemed that there was enough support to push towards a new phase of development. I spent an entire summer chasing potential donors who had signaled their interest at some point in time.

The reality of it is that people talk a lot, but hardly ever bother to put their money where their mouth is.

On paper, everybody admires a rebel for risking everything to fight for a just cause. In this temple of madness that we actually exist in, very few even dare to consider risking their own everything.

If compliments for my work were a source of nourishment, I would have become a ripe, fat bastard by now. Every time I’ve issued a call for donations and/or signaled financial distress to my readers by way of an update, I spend the rest of the day reading messages from people who want me to keep going.

However, there is a massive gap between people who want me to keep going and people who actually helped me do that. In spite of my best efforts, I have not been able to persuade enough people to turn words into action. In fact, less than 0.1% of the people who visited this website actually decided to donate.

The fact is that I can no longer sustain this platform. I may be stubborn, but even I am not stubborn enough to keep banging my head against a wall that just won’t budge.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why this happened. Some are external and beyond my control, others less so. I am not perfect and I am sure that there are plenty of things I could have done better. But, we’re not conducting an autopsy here, and there’s no point to crying over spilled milk, either. The point is that this is where we are right now, and the time to change the situation for the better has passed.

The point is that I tried my very best to give the country the kind of journalism I firmly believed it needed, and there weren’t enough people who thought the same thing.

To be clear, this project isn’t at this terminal stage because of a lack of interest on my behalf, though I understand that my tone may come across in that manner.

The truth is that I’d enjoy nothing more than getting the opportunity to continue spiting the rich and the powerful with my caustic writing.

I’m just tired of having to explain the value of what I do to people who seem to get it but choose not to get involved in it, simply because their privilege affords them the luxury of doing so.

So, here’s what’s going to happen from this point onward.