Abstract
Can news organisations develop bigger audiences and secure a commercial future by listening to what readers, viewers and listeners actually want?
When government minister Nigel Adams announced the creation of the £1million Future News Pilot Fund late last year and said he was looking forward to “a raft of new approaches” to public interest news, he probably expected to fund some cutting-edge technology and perhaps a shiny smartphone app or two. The culture minister almost certainly didn’t expect to fund newsrooms offering face-to-face gatherings.
Yet when the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced its 19 grant recipients three months later, six included physical meet-ups of some kind. This, remember, was before the arrival of Covid-19. From Bristol Cable’s “open newsrooms” to The Meteor’s community news hubs in Manchester, and from Black Ballad’s Birmingham-based project to The New Internationalist in Oxford, newsrooms across the UK proposed to revive public interest news by getting to know their audiences better in real life. Not via online platforms, not using overhyped software, just simple human contact.
Tortoise Media has been doing just that for a year now. The slow news start-up, co-founded in 2018 by former Times editor and BBC director of news James Harding, garnered significant media attention after it raised £530,000 in the largest media-related crowdfunding campaign to date.
The publication has now been awarded £50,000 by the Future News Pilot Fund to expand its “ThinkIn” events – live discussions designed to allow members of the public to help to shape the news agenda – to local media. In doing so, Harding and his team of 50 full-time staff hope to find a sustainable model for local journalism at a time when there are few options on the table.
Inspired by Fleet Street news conferences, ThinkIns have been a core part of Tortoise’s offering since it launched to the public in April last year. More than 300 events have been hosted around the world, from Grimsby to Lesvos, Brighton to New York. Most are focused on a topic – for example, the rise of the far right or gambling in football – and involve experts who are well placed to lead the discussion. Some are hosted in the evening with alcohol, while others take place in the morning with caffeine or juice. All are designed to be lively and enjoyable.
What makes them different from regular media events is that the discussion informs what editors commission for other members to read. An extended investigation into the rise of children in care and an explosive story about historic sexual allegations at a Cambridge University college, for instance, both began as comments by members at a ThinkIn.
It’s why Harding calls the ThinkIns “the engine of our journalism”, and why Tortoise co-founder Katie Vanneck-Smith, former president of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, agrees. She explained before the launch: “We believe that the more voices that you hear and listen to in advance of coming up with a point of view, the more informed that point of view will be.”
Unlike the local media organisations it may now influence by offering a sustainable model for news, Tortoise had large sums to build its own newsroom. With crowdfunded cash, plus multi-year investments from eight private individuals sourced by Tortoise’s influential co-founders, Harding, Vanneck-Smith and Matthew Barzun (former US ambassador to the UK), Tortoise was able to pluck some of the most experienced editors from newsrooms. David Taylor (Guardian US), Giles Whittell (The Times), Basia Cummings (The Guardian), Matthew D’Ancona (Evening Standard) and Polly Curtis (Huffington Post) joined a Tortoise Intelligence team with Danish economist Alexandra Mousavizadeh (Legatum Institute). Some have become partners as well as editors.
Tortoise has set about fulfilling a slow news modus operandi, and done it with some success. Strong long reads on UK issues, including the war on drugs, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and the House of Commons after John Bercow are interspersed with big, globally significant topics: the inner workings of Extinction Rebellion, an in-depth series on Apple’s approach to privacy, and a much-lauded, week-long series on Brexit by Chris Cook, formerly of BBC Newsnight. Everything is wrapped up and delivered in the Daily Sensemaker, a smarts-inducing mid-morning newsletter that is sympathetic to the informational overload so many of us feel we face. As a regular recipient, I believe more organisations could learn from its structure and tone.
Some of its best reporting has been done in audio form. A one-off hour-long podcast, Three Women Homeless, looked at the specific challenges of being a homeless woman through the eyes of Toni, Sharon and Nicky. Paul Caruana-Galizia, the son of murdered Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana-Galizia, retold the story of his mother’s death in a powerful three-part audio series. More recently, the weekly Tortoise podcast has approached the Covid-19 crisis through the lens of a parish priest, a zookeeper and a victim of domestic abuse, each in their own way moving.
But Tortoise isn’t without its detractors. Some have labelled it “Journalism for rich people” and perhaps there is an element of truth in that – 18 benefactors contributed £8,000 to the campaign, and another 20 gave £2,500 to be lifetime members. Others suggest that it isn’t as rooted in its members’ needs as it claims. Cut-price subscriptions for under-30s and commercially subsidised access for under-served communities mean Tortoise has a significantly younger demographic among its 29,000-strong subscriber database. That compares favourably to the UK’s traditional press, where the biggest reason for subscription cancellation is death.
Taking time to listen to their constituents
Tortoise is just one of a new guard of news organisations across Europe creating time and space to listen to their constituents, especially those who traditionally go unheard. In Belgium, for example, the co-operatively owned investigative quarterly Médor visits rural towns for a week at a time to meet local residents, hear their concerns and report on them together. Next door, in the Netherlands, a team of editors at De Balie, Amsterdam’s major cultural hub, run “live journalism” events in which more than 100 people come together to investigate an issue, culminating in an on-stage performance. In Greece and Romania, Inside Story and Decât o Revistă host pop-up newsrooms where readers can pitch story ideas and get immediate feedback from editors.
The trend holds closer to home too: Scottish outlet The Ferret, local news network Bureau Local, and Dublin Inquirer, a digital subscription publication based in the Irish capital, all convene members on a regular schedule to ask them what stories they would like to see published.
Academics are studying the impact of these new “public-powered journalism” models. Netherlands-based Irene Costera Meijer, Dave Harte at Birmingham City University, and Andrea Wenzel and Lindsey Green-Barber in the US have all studied newsrooms that seek to take views from a broader demographic. There is evidence that this kind of activity builds trust among consumers and, in some cases, financial support, although more research needs to take place.
More recently, Daniel Clarke, deputy editor at BBC Newsnight, spent six months as a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, looking at how the public can shape the news agenda. Daniel came across The Ten Million, a project by Swedish Radio, Sweden’s public service radio station, in which journalists worked in partnership with 25 local radio stations to ask as many people as possible one simple question: “What are you worried about?” No angle, no agenda, just a simple and open call out for stories. They received hundreds of previously untold stories, including one about a retired woman whose pension was so low that she couldn’t afford to visit her children. The story made it on to the front of every national paper and started a nationwide conversation. Not bad for something that began with an open-ended question.
Tortoise’s ThinkIns have had to undergo a change in medium since the coronavirus crisis hit, but that doesn’t mean they have slowed down or become less popular. More than 10,000 people have participated via Zoom since lockdown in the UK, with staff hosting two or sometimes three digital events a day. Tony Blair, Ruth Davidson and author and podcaster Jon Ronson have all appeared, while forthcoming topics for future ThinkIns include “Will the pandemic breed any game-changing ideas?” and “What mustn’t be forgotten during the Covid-19 crisis?”.
If Tortoise were to answer its own questions, it would suggest that journalism that listens to its audience has a future, whether face to face or online. Its ThinkIns, and other initiatives like it, might be resource-intensive and sometimes time-consuming, but they could be the basis of a local news business model that finally pays. As long, that is, as we don’t interrupt it before it has had a chance to finish.
