Don’t take the bait

Dear Londoners — we hope your weekend is going brilliantly.

We’ve been up and running for a little over three months now. So far, it’s been a blast — a whirlwind of venture capital nurseries, greyhounds, faux-historic pubs and radical plans to scrap the tube zones. 

By now, you’ve probably noticed that The Londoner feels a little different to your usual local news outlets. The kind of stories we cover, the way we cover them, the fact that you’re probably reading this in an email instead of a popup-riddled website creaking under the weight of auto-play videos. Why, you might well be wondering, have we chosen to do things this way? What’s the big idea?

To answer that, we need to go back all the way to the halcyon days of 2007. Leona Lewis’ seminal ‘Bleeding Love’ was topping the charts; Gordon Brown had just become prime minister; the first iPhone was launched, all hematite-gloss and supple edges. For local news, things were looking good. Classified ad sales were the mainstay of cash going into the sector — almost £2bn to regional titles. If you wanted to sell your car, your house or advertise a job, there was only one thing to do: stick it in the local paper.

Of course, 2007 was the precipice. Unbeknownst to the then-thirteen-year-old me, preoccupied only with belting out ‘Bleeding Love’, everything was about to change. The global financial crisis was setting in, and with it unprecedented economic carnage. And that iPhone launch was a portent of something huge — the mass movement to online. For local news, the shift to cyberspace posed a difficult question. What do you do? After all, you’ve never given away physical copies of the newspaper for free. But when the entire point of the early-years internet was to be open and accessible, could you really charge people to read your articles?

Almost every local title made the same decision: stick it online gratis. Most of the money was coming from classified ads anyway, and this was yet another place where people could advertise stuff. In that light, the digital switch was an opportunity — wasn’t it? The answer lies in the beautiful chart below, which takes us from that fateful year up until 2022. The amount of classified ad revenue from the physical paper has, literally, been decimated (blue on the chart below). But did the amount coming from online news sites (pink) go up to compensate? No. After all, who in their right mind would sell their house in the paper instead of just using Rightmove? Ditto jobs (Indeed), cars (Autotrader), and all the other random stuff you might be looking to flog (Ebay, Gumtree, etc). Local newspapers found themselves decimated.

Everything that follows, follows from this. Thousands of journalists made redundant; papers gutted to a few flimsy pages. And with it, the unstoppable rise of the new holy grail in local news: the click. The click is why your local news website is filled with stories about which child stars now look unrecognisable, about which weird tricks doctors recommend to lose belly fat. The click is why getting to the end of an article without accidentally clicking on a popup can feel like an insurmountable task. The click is why grisly crime news is pushed to the fore, and thoughtful, interesting features about arts and culture and life are dropped. The click — and how to get more of it — is the overriding concern in many newsrooms today.

Why? To use a hackneyed journalism cliché, you need to follow the money. And the money in online local news comes from that screaming popup ad you scrolled past, after clicking on the headline that sounded intriguing. Actually clicked on the ad? More money again. But each individual click is only worth pennies, so the pressure is on to get as many of them as possible. Which is why so many articles overpromise and underdeliver, why so many of them are simply a cacophony of ads next to a (barely) rewritten press release. Once the intriguing headline has laid a sufficiently tempting bait, the job is done. There’s little incentive to do the hard work of journalism; proper investigations can take months. It’s quantity over quality, every time.

But we think that’s a problem. And it’s a problem because proper local news actually matters. London is a city unlike anywhere else in the world: strange, beautiful, brilliant, chaotic, alive; a city 2,000 years old and just getting started. Of course it needs to have proper journalism covering it. That’s why I left a comfortable editing job at the Financial Times to join this team of three on our ambitious, uncertain venture. Maybe it was a mad choice — but I’m certain it was the right one. Because I believe there is another way to do local news, one that puts quality first. And, crucially, I believe it can work.

I hope we’ve already shown that we’re serious about quality news. We’ve held local politicians to account over what goes on in the properties they own. We’ve taken you to the strange world of cleaning the underground late at night. We’ve followed the last lamplighters around to understand how the city’s changing lights reflect its identity. And we’re only just getting started. 

But how can an outlet focused on high-quality, in-depth London news keep going, without being forced to shut down — or worse, resort to pumping out clickbait nonsense? There’s only one answer: the people of London have to get behind us. We need your support as a paying member. That’s not a charity call — you’ll get much more of our journalism in return (and a huge thanks to those of you who have already joined). But I want you to understand why, without your cash, we won’t be here in a few years’ time. 

But here’s the true beauty of reader-funded media: it’s a two-way street. If we’re funded by you, we answer to you. It’s all about incentives: you want proper journalism and, to keep you on our list, we’ll need to give it to you. It’s why there are, in the end, only two options: reader-funded quality journalism or ad-funded clickbait. 

We’ve made our choice. Now, we ask you to make yours. If you’re happy with insubstantial coverage, congealed with popups and clickbait, then you don’t need to do anything. But if you want London to have the kind of news it deserves, then back us on our mission, and join today.