Haircuts, loaves of bread and journalism all have one thing in common
An editor's note from Joshi
There’s good news and bad news — let’s start with the bad.
It’s been a horrific few months in journalism. This week, dozens of reporters and editors at BuzzFeed lost their jobs after the company’s news division was closed down just eight years after it started. You might associate BuzzFeed with mostly unfunny quizzes or celebrity “listicles”, but the news section of the company won major awards for its investigative reporting in the US and the UK. It was held up as a hopeful example of how high-quality news could transition into the digital age.
Along with sites like VICE and Vox, it was part of a wave of digital-first companies in the US who rose to prominence around a decade ago and looked set to become the new global media giants as old-fashioned newspapers faded away. I know many people who worked for those companies in London and New York as they grew their newsrooms at incredible speed.
The BuzzFeed News shutdown wasn’t actually a surprise. Almost every week at the moment, another media company shuts down or lays off masses of staff. So far in 2023, the MEN’s parent company Reach Plc has initiated two rounds of layoffs, and let journalists go in Manchester and Liverpool. Popular sites like Eater London and Gal Dem have folded recently too, often accompanied by a wave of tributes from readers saying how much they will be missed.
Sometimes this winds me up a bit, to be honest. When Gal Dem, a highly original site written for and by women of colour, announced it was closing shop last month, there were literally thousands of tributes posted on Twitter. People posted about how brilliant Gal Dem was and how important its stories were. There’s even been an early day motion in Parliament recognising the contribution the site made.
So how on earth, you might be thinking, is this website going under?
You would assume media companies that hit the wall are the ones that haven’t connected with readers or have struggled to build up a loyal following. Given how many options there are to read on the internet, making an impact as a new brand is very hard and lots of ventures just never take off. That’s life, that’s business.
But that’s clearly not what happened to Gal Dem. Just like with BuzzFeed News this week, what I saw on Twitter was a tidal wave of grief and anger. If this many people are following a site and value its stories, surely it should be able to sustain itself?
Except, that’s not how it works. As you probably know, I run a media company and I have bills to pay. I pay salaries for our team of Mill reporters and editors; I pay fees to our brilliant network for freelancers and photographers and illustrators across Greater Manchester; I pay for extra editors to come in on shifts to improve particular kinds of stories; I pay for lawyers to look over stories so that we don’t get sued by the people and companies we write about and so that our journalism can be as robust as possible without threatening the existence of the company; I pay for our journalists to access documents and travel to meet sources and access training courses about long-form writing and investigative journalism. Those are the basic costs of trying to produce exceptionally high-quality journalism, and obviously I also pay for regular boring company stuff like accountants, our newsletter platform, our payments platform, software tools, marketing and rent for our office in the Royal Exchange.
And you know what? None of those costs are paid for by nice tweets. We get tremendous public support for what we do, which is hugely gratifying and encouraging for the team, and which I appreciate immensely — but an uncomfortable truth remains. Public support doesn’t pay any of our bills. The reason that all these much-loved media companies are going out of business is not because people didn’t like their journalism, it’s because people didn’t pay for it.
When sites like BuzzFeed News emerged as a serious force in the middle of the last decade, there was a genuine belief among many media executives that online advertising would cover the costs of good journalism, just like print ads used to in the pre-internet age. The idea — which bizarrely still seems to hold some currency at companies like Reach Plc — was that if you got millions and millions of people to read your site, the revenue would follow and would make up for collapsing print income. But it didn’t.
It didn’t and it hasn’t and it won’t, because the internet is too large for any one webpage visit to be worth more than a few pence, and because platforms like Facebook and Google are vastly more attractive to advertisers than appearing between two paragraphs of a news story on the MEN.
When I see these big online outpourings about the latest deceased media company that everyone supposedly loved, the only question in my head is: how many of you paid for it? Gal Dem had a membership scheme that allowed people to contribute and had thousands done so, it would still be publishing. But they didn’t.
The media companies that have succeeded in recent years are almost all ones that are funded by reader subscriptions — think: the Economist, the FT, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Times. They have grown their revenues and grown their newsrooms and are doing some of the best journalism on the planet. Companies like VICE, Vox and BuzzFeed — who bet on ad revenue driven by great branding, excellent Twitter vibes and massive page views — are now worth a fraction of their former values and have laid off countless journalists. So has the MEN’s London-based owner Reach Plc, whose former head of regional newspapers admitted last year that in his time there he was “responsible for leading more than 40 cost-saving restructures”.
The lesson is achingly obvious and would frankly seem bizarre if you made a similar statement about loaves of bread or cups of coffee or haircuts: journalism needs to be paid for. Not tweeted about or emoted over or “valued” but paid for with money. If you like a media company and you value what it is producing, pay for it. If you have the means — and generally we’re talking about monthly subscription prices that cost much less than a round of drinks — pay for several. That is the only way your favourite site or newsletter will survive in the long term, and the only way the journalists whose work you value will continue to be gainfully employed.
With the bad news ticked off, I’ll be briefer about the good news.
The good news is that The Mill is flying. I am a naturally optimistic person, but we’ve had the kind of start to 2023 that I would have struggled to believe when I was sitting around at my mum’s house at Christmas, mulling the year ahead.
We’ve sailed past our target of 2,000 paying members, way ahead of schedule. We’ve had a few months of consistently strong growth, which means that we can now start planning our next full-time hire.
We’ve been profiled by Radio 4’s Today Programme (“Mancunian movers and shakers pay attention to The Mill,” was my favourite line), mentioned twice in The Guardian and mentioned as a promising model by a big parliamentary report into the local news sector.
And now we get regular emails from journalists around the country and the world who say that we’re inspiring them to try a similar model (the latest ones were from Melbourne and Kent). It has been incredibly moving to see that our little team has created a genuinely global impact, helping to rebuild local journalism, a key pillar of communities and of democracy. Next week, I’m speaking to an international conference in Vienna about what we’re doing, which is not a sentence I expected to be writing when I started The Mill on my own in June 2020.
What am I trying to say with this overly long Sunday appeal email? That The Mill’s success hasn’t been some happy accident. We have been successful because we’re funded by our readers. At least half of our journalism isn’t free to read and we’re not chasing millions of online eyeballs. All we want is for lots of people in this city to say: I like what these guys publish, I value what they’re doing, and I want to pay for it and read more of it and be part of it.
Thankfully, that’s happening, and the more it happens, the bigger we will get and the more we will be able to do: more coverage of the arts; more reporting on business; more time spent on deep investigations; more video interviews with key local figures; more delving into the many tips you send us for stories. We have an opportunity here for this venture that started as a one-man band in Manchester and grew via the faith of hundreds of early fans to become a great media company that acts as a beacon to hundreds of others. If you’re on board with that, you know what to do.