Ping News CIC · The public interest news gateway
The deals the big groups get. Without being bought by one.
The big regional and national publishing groups get the tech deals, the national advertising and the platform money because they have scale. An independent title has the journalism and none of the leverage. We are the agent that closes that gap. You get the benefits of a being a big publisher but you keep your masthead, your newsroom and your independence.
Independent since day one.Owned by no one.
Ping in numbers
What we actually are
An agent. Not a platform.
A platform asks you to sign up and hope. An agent goes out, does the deal, and brings the money back.
1
We aggregate
One title in one town cannot get a meeting. Enough independent titles together can. We bring the scale that gets attention.
2
We negotiate
Advertising, platform partnerships, licensing. We take the terms the big groups get and put independent publishers on the same side of the table.
3
We pay out
Your share comes back to you. Our cut keeps Ping running and pays the people who did the negotiating. What is left after that goes into the next idea, not out to anybody as profit.
- Keep your name
- Keep your newsroom
- Take the deal
- Get paid
On the table
What we are negotiating
Tech deals, ad sales, government initiatives and funding - getting money to publishers quickly and efficiently
Big tech contracts
We are in conversation with large technology companies, Google among them, about contracts that pay money into local journalism. On its own an independent title is too small for that conversation to happen at all. Represented collectively by an agent, the same publishers become a counterparty worth contracting with.
ads•ping
Programmatic advertising run with Content Ignite. One tag, no downtime, and the publisher keeps control. A system most independent titles would never get access to alone.
Welsh News Accelerator
A Welsh Government fund we administer, paying independent Welsh publishers for the hours they spend on public interest journalism and supporting a one-of-kind dedicated reporter in the Senedd. How it works
Closed, on purpose
The syndication wire
We built a wire to sell independent stories on to regional and national newsrooms. It was a proof of concept, funded by the Google News Initiative, and we secured further funding to pay publishers to take part. On its own terms it worked: nearly 3,000 stories came in over two months, and plenty of them ran, including front pages in print and online.
It felt like it was working. The finance did not add up. Bigger newsrooms would not pay much for a story they could cover themselves, and often did cover it themselves. Independent publishers told us they saw their reporting turn up rewritten elsewhere, sometimes carrying quotes their own reporter had gathered, though two newsrooms chasing the same story can look much the same from outside.
The harder problem sat with the publishers themselves. Handing a story over meant losing the advertising revenue on it, and the stories worth the most were the ones a publisher least wanted to give away. Once the money that paid them to take part ran out, there was nothing underneath it.
So we have shut it down and taken it off this site, rather than leave it standing as though money were still on its way to anyone who joined.
We are leaving this entry on the page instead of deleting it quietly. A publisher deciding whether to trust us is entitled to know what we tried, what it asked of them, and what we did when it failed.
No publisher was left out of pocket, and what it bought was a clear view of how both sides of this market behave once money is involved. That is what the current work is built on.
On to the next idea.
On to the next idea.
The structure is the point
Nobody at Ping gets rich on your journalism.
The big regional and national groups answer to shareholders. That is not a smear, it is their job. Every pound of margin they find has somewhere else to be.
Ping News is a Community Interest Company. Our asset lock and community interest statement are filed at Companies House and they are not decoration: the asset lock means the company’s assets cannot be sold off or handed out for private benefit.
We draw salaries for the work, like anyone would. What the structure limits is what can be taken out on top of that. A CIC like ours may pay a dividend of up to 35% of its profits. We never have and never will, and the surplus goes back into the work.
You get the terms the big groups get. Nobody here takes a profit from them.
For independent publishers
If you publish local news, we should talk.
Tell us what you publish and where. No platform to join, no form that disappears into nothing. A conversation with a person about how we can help.