Abstract
Only one man could stop an ambitious student media initiative going bust, but how to persuade him to hand over the cash?
When you think of a venture-backed media company based in New York City, you probably don't picture 14 journalists packed into a 500 sq fit airless attic where mice were found in the kettle and the loo overflowed into the office on an almost daily basis. But that is where I found myself in the summer of 2016, just a year after taking £2million investment and landing in America to launch The Tab, a website covering student and youth news which I co-founded at Cambridge University eight years ago.
It was a familiar tale: we had burned through cash faster than planned, failed to grow revenues and were now desperately trying to raise investment money from venture capital funds. I was knee-deep in shit, metaphorically and - thanks to the bathroom situation - almost literally.
Fundraising can be a debasing experience. You spend hours with people who don't care about what you do, trying to convince them a graph is going up when it is actually going down. When you are raising money, every part of the business either ceases to be important or is commandeered for the purposes of impressing venture capitalists who want technology businesses that can be sold for billions.
Consequently, words such as “journalism” and “scoops” aren't very well received, and you find yourself pitching your business in a totally ludicrous way. Breaking huge stories and building a big, loyal audience isn't enough. Suddenly you are “a journalism platform which scales the newsroom experience to any community with the help of a powerful tech division”. By January 2016 we had six months of cash left, and we realised we would need to invent a tech story pretty fast.
From these conditions emerged Tabitha, an “editorial robot” who could commission stories from student journalists. Anyone could log on to our site, enter a few details and then join an instant message chat with Tabitha, where she would ask them questions and hopefully extract a splash-worthy story. Tabitha held thousands of conversations, and she did manage to commission stories. But she had no real impact on quality, and she was responsible for several howlers. The worst Tabitha cock-up involved a student who had bravely decided to share her experience of her parents’ death.
“So what were you thinking of writing about?” asks Tabitha.
“I'd like to talk about the death of both of my parents,” replies the student.
“You want to write about the death of your parents?” replies Tabitha.
“Yes.”
“LOL,” exclaims Tabitha, programmed to use slang abbreviations to make her feel more authentic.
The student logged off.
Tabitha proved the importance of human editors, and one of the first things we did after getting new investment cash in the bank was to take Tabitha out the back and shoot her. Technology has a really important place in journalism, but too many media companies try to shoe-horn it in when they're raising money, rather than using it because it can improve what they do.
By May we had been forced to lay off about 20 per cent of our staff and we had enough cash to make it until the end of July. Fortunately, we were thrown a lifeline by our existing investors which allowed us to keep going and then, with an enormous stroke of fortune, we got to meet Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch had been my dream meeting since we started the business. His newspapers are responsible for some of my favourite scoops, and I was convinced he would be interested if only we could get in front of him. So when one of our investors arranged a meeting in summer 2016 with the man himself, I was buzzing. The only hitch: the meeting was scheduled for the day after Glastonbury, and I really wanted to go to Glastonbury. So I did.
You might not think four days of mud, drugs and live music is the ideal preparation for a do-or-die meeting with the most successful media mogul alive. You're probably right. Fortunately, it was just a few days after Brexit, and spirits were high at the News UK building.
I turned up to the meeting with my co-founder George Marangos-Gilks. Both of us still had glitter on our faces. I had to borrow my friend's father's shoes because all I had were muddy trainers. My pitch to Murdoch, Robert Thomson and David Dinsmore was simple. I printed out every story that News Corp's papers and TV companies had ever copied from The Tab, and I put the huge book in front of them and said: “You care about original reporting. We break stories for a really young audience, and they love it.” Pretty soon the man himself was asking “So how much do you want?” and we shook on the deal. I found Rupert humble, charming and very funny.
With cash in the bank and confidence restored, we got back to the real business of breaking stories. When we landed in the US in 2015, there was obsessive speculation in the press about where Malia Obama, then the president's daughter, would choose to go to college. We scooped the entire White House press corps when one of our reporters spotted a photo of Malia wearing a Harvard T-shirt on Facebook. We celebrated the story in the office, but only after hurriedly cropping the photo post-publication when we realised it was filled with 17-year-olds who were entitled to privacy under US law.
You got me, babe
One memorable Tab story involved a Louisiana mayor named Mike Yenni. It was known in local establishment circles that Yenni, a religious married father of two, had a penchant for young men. One such young man, Alex Daigle, was a student who contributed stories to our team at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island. Alex wrote a first-person piece for us entitled “I was seduced by a politician”, telling how Yenni sent him sexually explicit messages and had meetings with him when he was 17 years old. Although we didn't name him, several other outlets immediately named Yenni as the politician in question. Yenni went on the offensive, rubbishing the story and claiming it was “fictional in parts”, but he also released a TV advert apologising to his family and admitting it.
We had a big breakthrough moment when a few of our female editors launched babe, a new site with the tagline “For girls who don't give a fuck”. babe is totally separate from The Tab, and it features outspoken, sometimes savage, writing and cult video series from its 23-year-old journalists. When Serena Williams was criticised for having visible nipples during a match, babe published a story headlined “We don't give a fuck if you can see our nipples through our shirt”, featuring photos of babe writers’ nipples showing through their shirts. The babe team is building a huge, loyal audience which actually cares about what it says, which feels different to a lot of media companies’ dry obsession with “monetising a valuable advertising category”. All I want our company to do is make youth media brands which people love, fear and imitate.
It is an amazing time to do journalism in America. Trump's election totally changed the atmosphere and the story touches everything. Even The Tab was dragged into the still-unfolding story of Russian interference in the election. We had published a small story at the University of Southern California about a hoax where someone had erected a sign saying “No black people allowed” outside a fraternity house. But we recently learned from a Wall Street Journal reporter that the photos and copy were lifted by a Russian organisation tasked with spreading fake news. It edited the story to make it appear real, and published it on Facebook to stoke racial tension.
Back in the UK, our young reporters were picking up on a political movement that most hacks only clocked at 10pm on election night. The first signs were in Leeds, when Jeremy Corbyn was scheduled to deliver a campaign stump speech in the student area of the city. Our team decided to live-stream the event ahead of time on Facebook, and within minutes Hyde Park was filling with people who hadn't planned to see the Labour leader. The stream soon showed a thick crowd, with some climbing lampposts and on to the balconies of student lets to get a better view. The same scene was repeated soon after in Newcastle.
Corbyn gave us interviews where he talked about the TV programme Love Island and cancelling student debt. For a generation used to bland New Labour and Cameroons, he seemed like something very new. By the time polling day came, we had been following Corbyn's campaign for weeks, and we were doing more traffic from politics than I can ever recall. It was clear that there was going to be a big youth turnout for Labour, especially among students, and our journalists were regularly going on TV news to explain Jezza's appeal.
I spent election night at a party at News UK's office in London Bridge, along with two Corbynista Ta b staffers. All evening people had jokingly told us: “If he wins, it will be your fault.” As the exit poll results were announced, the room fell into a deathly silence. It was swiftly pierced when Grace Vielma, The Tab's 25-year-old editor, punched the air and exclaimed “Yes!” to the disbelief of the surrounding hacks. Despite Rebekah Brooks telling me “This is all your fault”, I resisted the temptation to splash with “It was The Tab wot done it!”.
From here, the plan is to keep our faith in our sickeningly young editorial staff and push for world domination. The Tab is already bigger than most of the competition in the UK and, although it's not yet profitable, revenues have trebled. In the US we are experimenting with running seven-day local news channels on Instagram, and babe is building a frighteningly zealous fanbase. And, with any luck, we won't have to move back to the attic.
The writer is founder and CEO of Tab Media.
