Deals
What is on the table, and what is not.
Publishers in this sector have been promised a great deal and paid rather less. So everything here carries a label: live, in progress, or closed. We would rather be dull and accurate than exciting and wrong.
What we have on the table
Big tech contracts
We are in conversation with large technology companies, Google among them, about contracts that pay money into local journalism rather than extract value from it.
This is the clearest case for an agent existing at all. A single independent title cannot get that meeting, and would not be worth contracting with if it did. A represented collective of them can, and is.
Status: in conversation, nothing signed. We will say so here the day that changes, and not before.
ads•ping
Programmatic advertising for independent publishers, run with Content Ignite, a team of former publishers who spend their time simplifying ad tech.
A single tag, no downtime to onboard, and the publisher keeps control of ad management: on-page monetisation, real-time insights, performance checks, trend analysis, geo-targeting and forecasting.
It is the agent argument in miniature. This is a system most independent titles would never get access to on their own terms, or at all.
Welsh Public Interest News Accelerator
A Welsh Government fund, administered by Ping, paying independent Welsh publishers for the hours they spend on public interest journalism. Ten organisations a year, three years running.
Grants of up to £9,400 in the first round from a £100,000 fund, and up to £7,000 in the most recent.
ICNN
We speak often to the Independent Community News Network, which represents more than 120 independent news organisations, sets membership criteria and standards, and speaks for community media collectively. We are not formally partnered, but we are pulling in the same direction.
Members must be free of commercial, political and religious ties, and follow IPSO's Editors' Code or the Impress Standards Code.
PINF
We speak often to the Public Interest News Foundation, the UK's only charity dedicated to regenerating local news.
PINF runs the Local News Fund, bringing new money into local journalism, and campaigns with the BBC, big technology companies and local government on the conditions independent news needs to survive. Much of that is the same ground we are negotiating on, which is why we talk, even though there is no formal arrangement between us.
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.
We have shut it down rather than leave it standing as though money were still on its way. If you were part of it, nothing further is expected of you and nothing is owed under it.
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.
For independent publishers
Want to be in the next one?
The deals get better as more independent titles are in them. That is the whole mechanism, and the reason to get in touch now rather than later.