Today, 21 October 2025, is the first anniversary of The Maltese Herald: a year in which we defied the odds to create a new media outlet in a very hostile and non-profitable market. Looking back at our beginnings—creating something once deemed impossible—we are proud and happy with what we have achieved so far.
To arrive at this point, we had to exert a super-human effort, and fund most of this work myself. Personally, I have given my life for this project. When one considers the conditions we are working in, our small achievements seem like successes of major proportion.
We are based in Malta, where the news and media industry is dominated by legacy players who are mostly dependent on government funding. We are trying to avoid this model and so far we have been successful. We have achieved cash-flow but we haven’t achieved profitability and we are still far-off the mark. We have gathered a loyal and growing audience and we have also established an international footprint. On the international news sector, we are competing not only with other media outlets for readers, we are mainly competing with disinformation produced and propagated by Russian state agencies and propaganda outlets.
We have no institutional backers or financiers and although this is positive in terms of editorial independence, we are short of the financing we need to fulfill this project to its full potential. We hope that in our second year, we will find the necessary credit facilities that will support us.
One of our biggest challenges remains libel law in Malta which is currently being abused to a great extent and in vexatious ways to silence our work. The Courts have been excessively severe against our right to publish and we also suspect that the lower-Courts are being influenced by government pressure and policy against free speech and the free press. We also had a case in which a judge used libellous comments by one of our competitors against us as part of his judgment restricting our right to publish. We find the current situation at the Courts unsustainable and potentially threatening to our existence.
Despite these massive challenges, our investigations and our work in our first year have proved incredibly successful. In one year we achieved more than 1.1 million unique readers (or devices) and up to 4.8 million page views. Our foreign affairs investigations have been quoted by BBC (Azerbaijan), Newsweek and The Atlantic Council, Yahoo!, and even Wikipedia, among many others.
We are currently at three employees (excluding myself). We all work very hard and I deeply thank my colleagues and our contractors, who are doing a wonderful job: their support is invaluable and I greatly appreciate their work.
I’m doing a superhuman effort to keep all of this together. Until we find the financing we need, it’s going to be a very rough ride. Support our work in any way you can, either by reading this website without ad-blockers or subscribing here. Donations are a very important source of income, and during this year, they have been significantly low – a phenomenon that apparently, is also being experienced throughout the press industry. You can donate via the details at the end of this article.
Our mission is crucial in the age of disinformation and proliferation of totalitarian propaganda. We stand at a critical juncture in history where truth is threatened by the narratives of totalitarians and illiberal states who want to shape the world on their misguided and destructive fantasies. Humans should be free and the world can live in peace: truth will set the way.
Above all, we remain staunch defenders and steadfast advocates for free speech, our most fundamental principle: without it, we couldn’t do our work. For more than twenty years in my life I have worked in publishing and advocated for free speech – The Maltese Herald is the culmination of this experience. My aim is to strive and grow this publishing footprint and legacy even further.
Finally, we thank our readers and subscribers who are our backbone. We thank you for your loyal support, which gives us a great responsibility to deliver the best product possible. We are always striving to improve.
The Maltese Herald is published by Dar Camilleri. I am the sole and single owner of The Maltese Herald and Dar Camilleri.
Subscriptions can only be made online via our system in the link here. Please do not send money for subscriptions (no guarantee we will send it back due to costs).
Donations:
Paypal: markcamilleri@autistici.org
Revolut: +35677007909
For crypto donations on the Ethereum blockchain: markcamilleri.eth
HSBC Malta Iban: MT49MMEB44026000000002058477001
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply