Buy bricks and mortar for local newsrooms

Secure independent small newsrooms across the country: Joe Mitchell

A Lankelly Legacy Interview. Hosted by Peter Pula

 

 

Joe, can you tell me a bit about your relationship with Lankelly Chase?

 

I was involved in two projects Lankelly supported. One was called the Transformative Journalism Project, and was about trying to connect under-represented audiences of a media property with the editors, in the hope they would become less under-represented or it would be easier for certain groups to make their views known.

 

The second project moved into a meta space. We were part of a cohort of a dozen or so people who’d received money at the same time as part of the Community Media Fund. We met every six weeks with all the other folks who’d been awarded.

 

It was just after the end of the COVID madness, so meetings were mostly on Zoom, but we did meet in person at least once. That gang of people got a group pot from Lankelly of about £30,000 and were just told to get on and spend it. It wasn’t a whole lot of money, but it was interesting watching a group that weren’t super connected try and find alignment and ways of using that money wisely.

 

It was quite hard to get people to make suggestions for how to spend the money – partly because it wasn’t very much. One of the most obvious suggestions was to just split it twelve ways, which might have been smart. But we tried to think about projects that would enable us to continue working together, to grow the bonds and connections. But it’s just so tricky in extremely time strapped organisations.

 

That was the most interesting bit: do we have a clear vision and mission we’re all collectively fighting for, or were we all actually interested in quite different things? And, really we’d just been thrown together by virtue that we’d all received grants before. If £100,000 had been on the table, people would have perked up more because it would have felt like there was enough there to make a difference on something. There’s so much that could be unpacked.

 

So where did the money go in the end? 

 

We had the intention of finding three news providers or newsrooms: a big national one, a local one, and a community-of-interest one. Then we hoped to find some under-represented groups, do some matchmaking, get them in the newsroom in person, and really get them making editorial decisions.

 

Of course, the reason that doesn’t usually happen is because editing is very particular and it’s a big ask. So in the end, we only got a couple of newsrooms to play, and then it’s quite hard to find organisations representing under-represented groups who don’t just run away screaming when they hear the words ‘news media’. You already feel like you’ve been not just under-represented but treated harshly, and potentially your group has suffered at the hands of the news media. So why would you play nicely with that?

 

We got some folks who were in a very low income group, pretty much on the breadline, into some meetings in the Daily Mirror editorial team. And they loved it. Whether The Mirror were able to learn quite as much from these folks, I’m not sure.

 

Everything took more time than expected. But the under-represented folks said they valued learning how newsrooms worked and seeing how editors made decisions about how to report the news – trust in journalism increased. So a tiny number of people, but step by step there was some interest in how newsrooms should be more transparent about how they make the news, which is actually something that’s stuck with us when we dream up the future of news. Openness and transparency in the process needs to exist for trust in journalism to be restored.

 

We decided on a few other bits. Someone ran an online conference and the group chipped in to make that happen. There was a project that brought two members of the group together to work on participatory storytelling guidelines, and that led to a toolkit which feels like it might be useful at some point.

 

The final chunk of money got spent on a bit of editing time. We all wrote something or produced some content telling our story of what we thought the future of media would be. That was seen as a solution to this problem of, did we all share the same vision? Well, let’s each write our own visions and then package them up together – and here’s an interesting storybook on the future of media.

 

There are a bunch of organisations and individuals I’d never met who I would now trust to help out on a project or to advise. So, that’s a nice ripple.

 

What is it that you would like from funders in the future? 

 

We’re six years old. We have a pretty good sense of what works in terms of our goal to improve the independent small newsroom sector across the UK.

 

We’re an infrastructure organisation, so we want a big chunk of money and then we’re going to dish it out to 100 different projects across the UK. We know that those 100 projects are amazing because we meet them regularly and spend time with them.

 

We’re at a point now where we feel ready to write that five to ten year vision. We know what one of the significant problems is, and we have a pretty good plan to tackle that. It’s just about the resource now. So solving the problem is going to require a big chunk of cash that we don’t think philanthropy has – but government has, and big tech has. So we’re just trying to make sure we exist for at least the next ten years to continue to make that case, and hammer on government and big tech: ‘Look how important this work is at the local community level. Look what happens if trusted, civic-minded information doesn’t exist in local communities’.

 

But to continue to make that case, we need to exist – that’s the goal. And then the dream dream is that the government or big tech goes, ‘Okay, cool, we totally get it. Here’s £100 million. That’s your endowment. Now spend that for the next 10, 15 years’. 

 

These are big asks, and we’re going to need storytellers, good storytellers, using facts and communicating in an interesting, creative way to bring people on that journey in a way that the whole damn system doesn’t just collapse around us.

 

We’re in a place where funders need to trust us and just give us core funding, and we’ll get on with the work over the next ten years. What we can’t do is take another £30,000 to do a specific project. We have to now focus in a more targeted way, and that’s really tough – especially within a journalism sphere that hasn’t had much funding at all before.

 

Our ears absolutely pricked up when Lankelly said, ‘We’re gonna shift our endowment away from big, heavy London HQ vibes to – as I understand it – lots of smaller endowments owned by the people who the work is supposed to impact’. But we’re not spending out, right? That’s important. We’re just transferring the wealth, and then the wealth will generate interest that groups can decide how to spend. I really like it, but I understand it’s very difficult to work out.

 

Let’s say you’ve got an endowment of £100 million, and 10% goes on information and media. So we’ve got £10 million, and we’re not allowed to spend that down – that’s got to be just transferred into other endowments. So either you could create a kind of civic media investment fund that invests in these local newsrooms and asks for a small return such that it can then reinvest in other places, or the really simple one is to buy buildings.

 

With our independent newsrooms, most of them are online, some are in print as well. A couple of them, really excitingly we think, have a high street shop you can walk into. We think that’s a rich part of the future of what a good small newsroom looks like in the 21st century. So why not buy 20 buildings across the country? You transfer the ownership of those buildings to the local newsroom, and bingo – they’ve got bricks and mortar, they can rent out space, they’ve got an income stream. They’re the owners now, and they’re people of the local community.

 

So that’s my pitch.

 

If all that were to come to pass, what is the best thing that could happen?

 

In 10 years time, we’d have this totally transformed local civic information ecosystem, where every town or city has a bunch of different independent news providers, podcasts, video, text and print, and it really looks great.

 

Everyone’s lives get better in every way if that quality information exists. We make thousands of decisions every day – sometimes individual, sometimes societal – and with better information, all those decisions get better. 

 

Story Weaving by Peter Pula and Sam Gregory

 

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