Abstract
Who says all the fun has gone out of journalism? Not the man behind a student brand making inroads into British and American universities.
It took just nine days for the first person to brand us “disgusting”. It was early autumn at Duke University, the Harvard of the South, where we had just launched The Tab, a British-born news website for students that I co-founded at Cambridge in 2009.
It wasn't exactly a new experience – over the past six years we've upset a few people; it comes with the territory of inviting 18-year-olds to write bold, original stories. But this was different. I'd arrived in America determined to do it differently, to be more sensitive and inclusive. “You'll have to change the tone in America,” said absolutely everyone beforehand, as if we were Nuts magazine trying to open an office in Raqqa. And we listened: The Tab US was – and is – a lot less rowdy than in the UK.
But we had clearly underestimated how tense American campuses were. Just one day into the launch of our Duke edition, we had published four stories. It had started well, with 30,000 views in the first three days. But maybe we'd done a little too well: the editorial mix was almost entirely interviews with glossy, exciting students.
And that's what led Louise Kendaru, a student born in Britain but American in sentiment, to write a Facebook post branding us “appalling” and “trashy, vacuous and obnoxious”. Within a few days, 1,000 people had liked the post. The pressure rose so much our student editor, a Duke student, woke his editor at 1.30am to tell her he felt like “we're off the edge of a cliff and can't get back on”.
He ultimately stepped down, warning The Tab may never work at Duke. It blew over – everything always does – and elsewhere, things were going swimmingly.
It was a lesson though, a big one. British journalists are always horrified by America's serious news style (what the writer Tom Chivers calls the “In headline, main point is buried” trope). But it makes more sense now. There is a pole of American society (and it is just a pole – there is a total opposite) that is horrified by British coarseness and which is much more sensitive and apologetic about elitism than anyone in Britain can imagine. When you work as a journalist in America you often feel like Toby Young or Tom Wolfe's Peter Fallow, drunkenly lurching into situations and then reassuring yourself: “it's them with the problem, not me.” But we had to adapt and make The Tab work in America, after coming this far.
We'd raised £2million six months earlier from Balderton Capital, a big and respected British venture capital firm, thanks mainly to the interest of Suranga Chandratillake, an insightful and articulate investor who had made his money in online video, and who told us: “I wouldn't have invested if I didn't believe this would be a billion-dollar business.” No pressure then.
We started The Tab as a red-top alternative (Tab is a pun on tabloid and Cantab) to student papers, which we felt were written for the benefit of a small clique of aspiring Guardian editors rather than the actual reading audience. Most student papers publish a mix of commentary on Middle Eastern politics, Premier League football coverage and dreary university press releases. In other words, stories where there is no original reporting. I spent a term as an editor for one such paper, along with my co-founder, George Marangos-Gilks, and when we realised none of our friends were reading it, we started our own thing.
Being online-only was a matter of necessity – we couldn't afford to print papers – but it became our key competitive advantage, since we could publish stories a week ahead of our rivals. The Tab quickly built a daily audience of 25,000 views and broke big, national scoops. It also nearly went under after we published a defamatory story about a children's television presenter. The subsequent apology included the line: “The Tab also acknowledges that Lizo was not gaffer-taped to a wall in Emmanuel College; he was not forced to lock himself in a toilet following a confrontation with students; and he was not ‘bug-eyed and sweaty’ as a result of a night of heavy drinking.” It is now used as a case study on graduate journalism courses, where it is described as the greatest apology in the history of journalism.
After Cambridge, I spent six months as a night reporter at the Evening Standard, a job that involved a lot of doorstepping unsuspecting Londoners, including the 50 Shades of Grey author EL James, whose identity I was the first to reveal. In June 2012, we raised £250,000 to take The Tab to other universities. It worked: we built an audience of 3million monthly readers and we were breaking even before our American expansion tipped us back into the red.
The Tab is a mix of light-hearted stories and important ones: we've broken stories on teenagers joining Isis, but we've also exposed drunken English cricketers. In the UK, the student beat can be a bit limited, but in the US, the whole country wants to know what's happening on its campuses. University sports matches attract crowds of more than 100,000, and TV networks cover protests. In our first month of operation, we had stories in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Fox News, Vice and elsewhere.
The model works like any other student paper – there is a local team at each university, with an overall editor and reporters beneath them. All are volunteers, although we are experimenting with a prize pot where students get money if their stories do well. It's so important to us that as we grow, the chief beneficiaries are the people on the ground who make The Tab a success.
Local feel
We employ 50 paid staff in total. Most of them are editors who commission stories from a group of university teams. In total, we run 85 teams (half in the UK and half in the US). All editions have a distinct local feel, but we share the best stories across the network. We've also just launched a national edition aimed at graduates from our universities who are now in the working world. The stories for this come from staff writers and the best student writers in the country.
Students join The Tab because it's fun and an amazing platform – the average story has an audience of 5,000 people. But it's also good for your career. We've hired 30 former Tab journalists and helped more than 100 into jobs elsewhere in the media. At a time where the jobs in local media are evaporating and it costs £9,000 to get training (and much more in America), we are restoring the bottom rung of the ladder. That's why we're working with publications such as The Sun, the i and The Big Issue to launch an industry-recognised qualification this year.
We tend to focus on the universities where there is a strong sense of community. We pretty much have all the important universities in the UK, and in America there are 200 we care about. We will have them by April 2017 and then we'll use the best of our network to build a global site aimed at twentysomethings. Our revenues come from advertising. We don't run display advertising at the moment – we do sponsored stories where brands work with us to publish an original story in our voice. It's all clearly marked as advertising. Our clients include Spotify, Netflix, Lidl, Unilever and KPMG. The big move this year will be into video, which is seriously in demand. We have a sales team of five, supported by two journalists who work on sponsored stories.
As we expand in the US we find there are two big issues on campuses there: rape and race. Concern about sexual assault and the way it is handled by authorities has led to a climate where first year students must attend consent workshops and where rape charities lobby for universities to investigate accusations rather than the police. It's an incredibly prickly topic, which I don't know enough about to speak with any authority.
And then there's race. It is impossible to imagine a country so simultaneously politically correct and racist as America (although I've never been to South Africa). Into this tense environment we blundered: five white British men who had grown up in a world where you did not think about people's race. The inevitable disaster came to pass when we reported a story about a student scrawling “no niggers” on a poster for the protest movement Black Lives Matter.
Admittedly our headline “Some dick wrote ‘no niggers’ on a Black Lives Matter poster” wouldn't make it past a Fleet Street sub, but it's a brave new world for headline writers, and I felt it was hard to deny the graffiti's author was a dick. It took about half an hour for students to condemn the headline, which they argued was making light of the racism, as if we were using the word “dick” in a playful, you-dozy-old-bugger kind of way. Add to that, we had spelled out the N-word, something that's hard to avoid when you are literally reporting the use of the word. Clearly, we had got it wrong, and we changed the headline (another luxury of the brave new world), but it somehow left us looking like the villain rather than the dick who wrote it.
The same issues exist in the UK, by the way, though at nowhere near the American intensity. You can tell a lot of concerns are imported to British universities just by the language they use and delay in uptake. Witness, for example, the prohibition of sombrero hats at the University of Birmingham for fear they would offend Mexicans. An understandable point of tension in America, where 30million Mexicans live and experience regular prejudice. Slightly less expected in Britain, which is home to just 5,000 Mexicans.
So let me tell you what's coming your way in 2016. All students will soon have compulsory consent classes. The concept of binary gender (ie that there two sexes: men and women) will become even less fashionable. And the memory of famous figures with questionable records on race will slowly be erased. You can't have missed Oxford students campaigning to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College. Many people consider Rhodes the father of apartheid, and the protest follows similar ones in South Africa. In America, they want to erase Woodrow Wilson's name from Princeton. Brits may think of him as the father of the League of Nations, but Wilson was also a racist. It would be surprising if other British students didn't start looking at the history of their benefactors and alumni. But where will it end: Churchill College? The statue of Henry VIII at Trinity College, Cambridge? I agree with the Rhodes and Wilson protesters, but a lot of others don't.
US students hate the media
What's harder to get on board with are some of the protestors' other demands, which include compulsory “cultural competency” education for all staff and students, and “a cultural space on campus dedicated specifically to black students”, which sounds a lot like segregation.
The bad news for journalists is that today's 20-year-olds hate the media with a frightening passion. The most high-profile campus drama in 2015 was at the University of Missouri, where the authorities' failure to deal with nasty racial incidents led to the whole campus going on strike, including the football team (who are worth millions of dollars a year to the university). But despite huge public demonstrations, the campaigners decided they did not want the media filming them. In one bone-chilling clip, a student photographer is harassed, obstructed and pushed around by students and university staff. One of the staff members subsequently turned out to hold a post in the journalism department. Astonishing.
It's not always so serious. In between covering protests and fear, reporting on US colleges gives you a taste of the America you dream of: the frat parties, the keg stands, the nudity. The British accent doesn't do much in New York, but it's different elsewhere.
After one visit to the University of Connecticut I opened my phone to discover a barrage of naked photos from a student I had met. In her messages, she asked me for both a job and a shag. You have to admire American enterprise, or “hustle”, as they call it here.
Arguably the golden age of carefree American college parties was the mid-2000s, when students expected to get a job and the university couldn't spy on you through social media. But you can still find it, and as you'd expect from a nation of extremes and contradictions, the partying, sex-obsessed American college experience co-exists with the censorious and puritanical side. They are the most interesting people on earth, and there is nowhere better to be in the news business.
The Tab is different to other media companies: our stories come from people embedded in the communities they report on. We're not just succeeding because our founders are brilliant judges of youth culture, we're a success because we have an army of 3,000 talented reporters who can tell you what's happening on the ground. And at a time when the media is awash with “content sites” that treat news like a product in a factory, we are educating a new generation of journalist to practise real, original reporting. It's a hybrid model: a combination of the energy of social media and the quality of professional media.
This model can work with any community, provided there is enough demand for news. Imagine the power of a global network of journalists who report for their own communities, but whose stories can be projected around the world. We're fixing local journalism and building a global media brand at the same time. America likes it: by the time you read this we will have a million monthly readers at 45 colleges. But that's not enough. To succeed, we've got to make them love us.
