Dear Readers,
Over the last fortnight, we’ve been speaking to editors at legacy publications and new media companies about what would happen to our industry if the Guardian implemented a paywall on their website. To a good chunk of you, this is perfect tedium, and you have our sympathy in this matter – so we have provided some mainstream featurettes by way of recompense. But we imagine that more than a fair share of our readership will be pretty intrigued by this hypothesis. Both cynics and devotees of the value of navel-gazing media content can, however, support the magazine by subscribing today. We’re happy to say that Issue 7 has now sold out, and you can beat the crush of the crowd for the next iteration of the print magazine in the link above.
The York Way
A fortnight ago, the CEO of Guardian Media Group plc (GMG), Annette Thomas, resigned after just a year in the role. Multiple reports cite a clash of personalities with the editor of the Guardian, Katharine Viner. There is no suggestion that this brief executive tussle at the newspaper, which currently operates the sixth-biggest English language news service in the world, was animated by differing attitudes towards implementing a paywall. But in truth, our interest in the subject was not occasioned by investigating the internal politics at Guardian HQ.
Since setting up The Fence, we have been surprised by the amount of support that our project has received across the Atlantic. We provide zero American reportage. We have received minimal press there. To cover the postage costs, a North American subscription costs £60, more than double the UK price. And yet at the time of writing, eight percent of our subscribers are from the United States or Canada. Which is very much welcome, but significantly disproportionate.
For some time, we’ve been wondering why this is the case. While it’s tempting to assign this trend towards wooly, imprecise cultural differences, it seems there are more structural issues at play. In America, all the major publications – the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, New Yorker and so on – all operate a paywall system.
Over here, the Times put one into place in 2010, and has since been joined by the Financial Times, the Economist, the Telegraph, etc. In fact, the Guardian is the only UK broadsheet not to maintain some form of paywall. Given their reputation as a bastion of liberal values, their billion-plus page views and the great galloping breadth of their coverage, might it be that the Guardian, despite its growing global domination, is skewing attitudes towards journalism in its country of origin? Don’t we all pay £159 pounds each to the BBC to get the news for ‘free’? What would the British mediascape look like if the Guardian implemented a paywall?
These were among the questions that we had. So we addressed them to editors at famous magazines and newspapers who operate with a paywall, which is nearly all of them. Surprisingly, they all agreed with our sentiments, but also insisted, for a variety of reasons, that they couldn’t go on the record. So we decided to speak to our fellow brethren among the Upstart Media.
Our first point of call was Jonathan Nunn, who started Vittles in the teeth of the pandemic last March. A food-based newsletter, Vittles has won plaudits for paying its contributors £400 per article, while delivering content that any legacy publication would give their right arm to have published. Nunn, who charges £40 a year to his paying customers, told us that:
‘For the first few months of Vittles’ existence I resisted operating a paywall in fear of looking like Murdoch, instead asking people pay out of the goodness of their own heart. But as soon as there was something extra behind the paywall, subscriptions doubled in two days, which made me feel incredibly stupid for not doing it before.’
As a regular contributor to the Guardian, Nunn appreciates the value that the newspaper gives his career, as it allows his writing to broadcast to an illimitable global audience rather than the cloistered walls of Substack. But as his own publication grows apace, he feels that a hypothetical Guardian paywall could have sizeable effects for the wider British mediascape.
‘I think the knock on effect for smaller independents would be twofold. Firstly, there would suddenly be a gap for a left-leaning news outlet without a paywall, that someone else could fill. I think it would also put an end to the battle over whether newspaper journalism can ever be free, hopefully leading to a culture of actually paying for shit.’
And when it comes to paying for shit, Joshi Herrmann had some opinions to share with us. Like Nunn, he is a contributor to the Guardian, and a fan of their journalism, but he is also the editor of the Mill, which is a singularly impressive addition to the media firmament. Focusing on deeply reported stories from Greater Manchester, it has grown an audience of over 12,000 email sign-ups in just over a year.
Herrmann feels that in the UK there is a widespread misconception about how journalism works. Publishing stories that might pique the national interest require the attention of skilled reporters, who need, more often than not, experienced editors to commission, guide and encourage them. These same editors call on lawyers to navigate the shallows and depths of Britain’s byzantine libel laws. And we can tell you – privately, and in great detail – that none of this is cheap. In face of these costs, newsrooms in this country are shrinking, including the one at the Guardian, which cut 70 editorial jobs last year.
With decreasing advertising revenue and print sales, organisations across the Atlantic have enjoyed deepening coffers from implementing a paywall, with readers hungry for verified facts in this frenzied and confusing era of fake news.
But here are the headlines. The NYT has 1,700 journalists; double the number they employed a decade ago. The Washington Post has 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it from the Graham family in 2013. On these shores, the Times Newspapers operate with chunky, new-found profits.
According to Herrmann, ‘no one in their right mind thinks that the Guardian wouldn't practice more high-quality journalism if they put in a paywall’.
Aron Philhofer thinks differently. A former senior digital executive at the NYT, he was poached by the Guardian back in 2014. He oversaw the establishment of GMG’s unique membership business model, where readers are invited to contribute £75-£500 annually, or to make a one-off donation. Last year, the Guardian received 531,000 of these, to go along with the revenue made from both print and digital subscriptions. It’s confusing, but it has allowed GMG to make a majority of its revenue outside of the UK. For Philhofer, the business opportunities for having content free to view are clear to see:
‘The Guardian has been extremely successful outside the UK as well with the membership strategy, and I think a paywall would stop that in its tracks pretty much. Remember, unlike the New York Times, which is about 90 percent US in terms of readership, the Guardian is only about one-third UK. I think they have a huge opportunity in the US in particular – but not with a paywall.’
And paywalls don’t come for free. The cost of developing, acquiring and maintaining one are ‘monumental’ according to Philhofer, who also feels that a paywall is not compatible with the Guardian’s ‘mission and value’ to provide access to journalism regardless of the means to pay.
We wanted to know more about this mission and value in more prosaic detail. So we spoke to two people in senior positions at the Guardian. Both of them relayed that many members of staff, especially reporters, would like to see a paywall implemented. Both of them reckoned the policy has been to ‘never to take the option of the paywall off the table’, as you can only do it once. But both of them said it is very unlikely to happen in the near future.
Is the Guardian conscious of how its lack of a paywall might be affecting the broader media landscape? When we asked one source, they laughed, saying ‘No. It is the most solipsistic institution. No one has ever mentioned that angle.’ The other source added that among senior leadership ‘there is a belief that no paywall is noble and morally significant and it is a belief that is not challenged.’
There are practical benefits to being the only broadsheet without a paywall. ‘It’s pretty useful to have the internet to yourself,’ said one source. Both our insiders had access to the data that showed which subjects drove subscriptions and donations, which one neatly summarised as ‘Brexit, Trump and Marina Hyde articles’ and not the game-changing investigations which the newspaper prides itself upon.
This leaves us with several questions. What happens if and when the news stops being so unrelentingly intense? And does chasing traffic vacate journalistic obligations? For both our sources, there was a feeling that operating behind a paywall could drive more unique journalism at the Guardian. It’s a feeling that’s being put into action at another left-liberal publication. During a long conversation with a member of the editorial team at the New Statesman, they revealed that they are currently refining their paywall. At present, they offer four articles per month for free. There are plans to scale this down to just one, which they feel will allow them to serve their audience better.
Developed analytics are central not only to serving your audience, but also to expanding it. Over the last few years American publications have been signing top British journalistic talent, resident in the UK, to write about British issues but for a global audience. (For examples, see: Helen Lewis at The Atlantic, Rory Smith at the NYT, the recent appointment of Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff at the same publication). Sam Knight, who back in 2017 wrote what is widely regarded as the best Guardian long-read to date, is now a staff writer at the New Yorker. Speaking to sources in America, we heard that his appointment was due to Condé Nast executives reading the analytic runes and realising that top British writing would lead to more digital subscriptions from the UK, and also from other European territories.
Over at the NYT, expanding into the UK is a central plank of their strategy to drive up to ten million subscribers by 2025. We hear that they benefit – in a product no doubt sponsored by their immense digital revenue – from extraordinarily sophisticated audience development tools which are allowing them to target subscribers in different regions of the UK.
Yes, the NYT is an outlier. But we’re struck by the diffusion of upstart publications in the States of relatively recent vintage. Would a young publication of the intellectual heft of the Drift be possible on these shores? And what’s the link between legacy publications operating paywalls and people being willing to support new publications financially?
The Guardian is run by the Scott Trust, which has a billion-pound endowment. Set up to protect the financial and editorial independence of the newspaper, among their declared core values are ‘a subsidiary interest in promoting the causes of freedom in the press and liberal journalism, both in Britain and elsewhere.’ There is no mention of journalism being made available for free in these core values.
Now that she is without a challenger, there is little incentive for Katharine Viner, who is opposed to paywalls, to put one in place at the Guardian. But there does seem to be a lot of evidence that she should consider otherwise.
Anxiety of Influence
In an interview with MagCulture, the tasteful editor of Kindling, Harriet Fitch-Little, salutes the work of The Fence, saying that we have lots of ‘really funny ideas’, citing our Secret Chef pieces. Unfortunately, this wasn’t our idea, we filched it wholesale from Spy Magazine’s ‘review of reviewers’. We’ve taken a couple of other ideas off their shelves, too. Time to salute the originators!
Martian FM
In an online piece, Ian Martin travels back in time five years to have a quick word with himself about Brexit. Ian, who was a writer on In The Thick of It, Veep and a co-writer on The Death of Stalin, is an extremely generous man who has just helped us with a deeply stupid article for Issue 8 which we’re very excited to share with you soon.
Compassionate Action
A new story in Private Eye details the remarkable legal stipulations attached to people using Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s website, Archewell.com, to share stories of times they ‘actioned compassion’ in their communities. These include granting a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license for Archewell to publish or use their story in any format – and may even extend to these compassion-actioners having to foot the bill for any legal fees or damages that result from their use of the submissions.
The idea of Prince Harry thinking about feelings is a terrifying one – indeed, it was one of The Fence’s chief concerns about his move to LA. It’s hard not to feel that, given all he’s experienced, if Prince Harry started having feelings he might well never stop. (The British tabloids, not satisfied with killing Princess Diana, are now doing their darnedest to also kill Martin Bashir.) So it’s nice to know that if he’ll be confronting a lifetime’s worth of trauma, at least he and Meghan will be outsourcing his legal fees to the American and British public.
In Case You Missed It
Olivia Carville has this disturbing report on AirBnB’s process of ‘making nightmares go away’ when they befall users of their properties.
No one thought to check the roof of a London bank for an extinct orchid, until this week that is.
Probing profile or puff piece? Mic Wright tackles THAT Boris Johnson article, and finds everywhere the stench of grift.
For WIRED, Will Coldwell tells us about a buried cube, a mysterious Japanese man, and a mid-00s treasure hunt that lasted for sixteen years.
What happened when one of Lonacoaning, Maryland’s 1200 residents won $731 million on the state lottery this past January, and decided not to tell any of their neighbours? Marc Fisher of the Washington Post goes in search.
David Fedman and Cary Karacas perform a low altitude bombing of Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘reckless’, ‘simplistic’ new book, Bomber Mafia, in one of the heaviest critical bombardments we’ve read in a while.
When is a spokesperson not a spokesperson? When they’re a fake spokesperson speaking for Blade, the ‘Uber for helicopters’.
Olivia Carville has this disturbing report on AirBnB’s process of “making nightmares go away” when they befall users of their properties.
And Finally
The world awoke today to the terrible news that Matt Hancock is getting lots of play. Late last night the Sun published images of the Secretary of State for Health, 42, but cursed with the face of a sickly Edwardian child, caught in a ‘steamy clinch’ with his senior aide Gina Coladangelo
The protest that this is a strictly private matter holds limited water given that Hancock promoted Coladangelo, the director of a lobbying firm, to her current position, for which she is paid £15,000 for 15 days work a year. The Fence calculates that, assuming a forty hour week, each hour of the affair that happened on the clock cost the taxpayer exactly £125.
This being the modern Conservative Party, no one has faced consequences of any kind for any element of this. More distressing, perhaps, was the idea that Matt Hancock – who gives the impression of a man who’d sell you down the river for some Turkish delight and a ride in the nice lady’s carriage – is getting more than we are.
Hancock, a strange young boy you meet in an old house before discovering from a photograph that he died 100 years before, has a history of swaggering romantic failure. As a young man, he is said to have once dropped a girl off at her parents’ house in his Jaguar, prompting his date’s mother to ask: ‘darling, is it him or is it the Jag?’
Times have evidently changed. ‘It’s just more evidence of the world not being fair’, said Jasmine*, 26 ‘Some of us have to struggle along. And Matt is knee-deep in clunge.’ Asked why she thought Matt Hancock, the troubled young boy from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, had proved so alluring, she offered that he ‘does have lovely blue eyes’, adding that the shock of this morning’s news had inspired her to be more proactive about finding love.
Oli, 24, was morose. ‘At low points I’ve always comforted myself with the knowledge that I wasn’t repeatedly letting the country down while constantly giving off an undercurrent of weird sweaty nervous energy’, he told The Fence via DM. ‘The discovery that he’s getting more than me is going to take a lot to recover from.’ Asked to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten, with one being ‘barely noticeable’ and ten being ‘the revelation that Matt Hancock is getting more than you are’, he replied that it was ‘a solid ten without hesitation’.
For many, it was a bleak outlook indeed. ‘I’m in a relationship and Matt Hancock’s getting more than me’, said Imogen, 28. One reader suggested that Hancock should reimburse everyone who bought an ‘expensive lockdown vibrator’ over the last eighteen months. ‘I won’t pretend that my love life is desperate or dry as a desert’, said Beth, 22, ‘but do I have the power of a limp white man in Westminster? No!’
Others however, took heart from the revelation that Matt Hancock, a bullied side-character from a 1970s coming-of-age movie, was getting more than them. Janet*, 33, characterised her response as ‘schadenfreude, maybe smugness’, adding that she felt ‘relief that my job is not at stake’. She went on: ‘I think he’s finally become a relatable and genuine person. A man of the desperate COVID people’.
Jake, 29, felt ‘encouraged’, adding that ‘500 years ago Hancock would’ve been breastfed for life and used as bear-bait, but now he’s copping a feel in the corridors of the ministry of health. If he’s getting some, maybe there’s hope for me yet.’
It got us thinking: perhaps some good might yet come of the fact that Matt Hancock, last seen throwing rebellious members of his court through the Moon Door, was getting more than us. Taking our lead from the Guardian (see above), we decided to initiate our own soulmates service, ‘Hancock Courtships’, connecting stricken young millennials who can’t believe that Matt Hancock is getting more than them. A little like Raya for the terminally online. Our first matching couple, Jasmine and Oli (quoted above), were put in touch by email today. Further enquiries should be made to info@the-fence.com.
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A longer outing this week, which we’ve hope you’ve enjoyed, even if you don’t give a fig for sarky media content. But we do really need to have as many subscribers as possible to keep this newsletter free to read, and to keep this whole project on the road. There’s a handy link just below here.
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All the best,
TF
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