Dear readers — we hope you’re having a wonderful start to the week. You might have noticed things look a bit different around here lately. Our new website is now live, we’re going up in the world. What started as a one person band (that’s me, Kate) working in greasy spoons with minimal assistance is now a three-person team with a great roster of freelancers, a co-work and now a brand new website. It’s exciting.
The Dispatch was founded because we’d noticed the direction local news was heading in and we found it concerning: huge layoffs, writers being made to write several stories a day at the expense of quality, ugly websites covered in pop up ads. At a time where so much of our media is owned by a handful of press barons (or by the President’s favorite billionaire) this is even more worrying. But there’s a reason for these trends — it isn’t easy to make local news pay.
As it stands, The Dispatch is not a sustainable newspaper — it runs at a pretty heavy loss. We aren’t saying this to cause alarm, we’ve been growing nicely of late and we’re slowly but surely working our way towards sustainability. But it remains a long way off.
Here’s a quick example of the costs. Recently, we’ve focused much of our reporting time on the trend of slum landlordism across Birmingham. Last year we ran several stories looking at Lotus Sanctuary, a company specialising in the murky world of so-called ‘exempt accommodation’, founded by a man who dreamed of “solving homelessness” (before Lotus eventually went bust, its various associated companies owing upwards of £13 million). More recently we’ve done stories about HSPG, whose co-founder Guy Horne has similarly modest goals (he too wakes up every day hoping to solve homelessness), Aspire Supporting Living, and most recently, we’ve reported on Labour councillor Waseem Zaffar, who failed to help a tenant contending with rats and mould in his sister’s HMO.
If you run the numbers, these stories don’t really pay. Take the story about Aspire, a company which takes large sums of taxpayer money to provide extra ‘support’ to vulnerable tenants, while running houses that more resemble slums. After reading that story, 14 new members signed up at a cost of £8 a month.
Of that 14, a few sign up to simply read the story, before cancelling the subscription straight away (no judgement, we’ve all done it!). What it means though, is that that story earns us a total monthly revenue of less than £100 — or something like £1000 over the course of a year if all of those new subscribers choose to stay. The recent story about a house flip in Dudley brought in seven, again of which some immediately left, putting it at less than £50 for a month (£500 annually).
We don’t have ads on our stories (with the exception of one ad on a Monday) so that really is the total income for that story. Needless to say, when you factor in the combined cost of the writer’s salary during the reporting time (which in the case of Aspire was a couple of weeks), as well as the cost of editors, lawyers to perform legal checks and all the other miscellaneous costs, coworking spaces and teabags, you might be left thinking: this proposition wouldn’t impress Gary Neville in the Dragon’s Den.
It’s true, writing 2000 words about rogue landlords isn't a get rich quick scheme (it’s notably less profitable than simply being a rogue landlord, we have found). But don’t pity us! Slowly but surely we’re working towards being able to say we break even. We’ve run the numbers, and that would occur at just over 2000 paying subscribers — currently, we have 1,155.
The challenge is this: to create a model for journalism which funds itself without needing to resort to lazy clickbait or running a website where the text is drowned out by ugly pop up ads. It’s a big challenge but we think it’s achievable.
But let’s be frank: we will only be able to provide an alternative to the depressing trends in local media with your support. If The Dispatch can’t get to a place where we’re breaking even it will eventually cease to exist. So if you’ve been uncertain as to whether or not you should back us, perhaps this is the time to do it. With your help we can build the local journalism Birmingham deserves.
Comments