Why is it so hard to do this stuff in London?
A quick break from our usual Sunday email — we’ve got big news for the Spy
Morning — we’re off on holiday this week at Spy HQ, so we thought it’d be a good moment to update you all on our exciting plans.
TLDR: We’re launching paid Spy memberships in March, and with it a big run of fun, well-reported London stories exclusive to our members. We’ve now passed 4,000 Londoners signed up to the Spy, and raised close to £3,000 in day-one pledges — so we reckon it’s about time we got serious about our future.
On top of our usual (free) Spy content, we’ll be publishing new member-only issues on: London’s pub tycoons, and the dirty tricks involved in running a drinking empire in the capital; the best view in London, and why it’s blocked off by a security fence; the bickering between London’s churches, as they argue about who’s the oldest; the rise of the noise complaint, and what it’s doing to London’s nightlife. And much more!
Read on to hear how we got here, and for more details on our plans. But if you’ve already convinced, you can pledge a paid subscription to the Spy using the button below, to get you ready for launch. You won’t pay anything yet, but you’ll be all signed up when we press go, so you don’t miss a thing. All for less than a pint each month.
Help us bring a quality news mag to London
If we had to boil our objectives for the Spy down to one thing, it’s making Londoners feel connected to the city they live in. Showing you what the communities around you care about. Putting the big projects and big decisions on your radar. Explaining why things are changing the way that they are. Sharing silly links to all the mad stuff in the city.
The thing is, doing that shouldn’t feel like we have to reinvent the wheel. It’s local news, basically, and in our case for a city of nearly 9m people who, one way or another, want to know what’s happening near them. But it does feel a bit like that — because what Londoners have on offer at the moment is pretty much broken.
In August last year, the Evening Standard posted its sixth consecutive annual loss. London’s biggest paper has now racked up debts of just under £84.5m since 2017, with its circulation dropping from over 800,000 to under 300,000 in that time. The Standard’s owner, British-Russian businessman Evgeny Lebedev, keeps having to dip into his own cash just to prop the whole thing up. Meanwhile, City AM has been put up for sale, as it too deals with the drop in eyeballs from daily commuters. The more tabloid-flavoured MyLondon launched in 2019, but in the past year it’s reportedly been haemorrhaging pageviews, as its parent company, Reach PLC, carries out sweeping job cuts on its local titles. Even the BBC has scaled back its bespoke London output, amid its local radio cuts. Why, when so many people care about London, is it so hard to make a news publication for the city work?
And what suffers in all this is the breadth and depth of the reporting on London that’s out there right now. We don’t want to be too down on this — afterall, so many of you love our Spy round-ups, which are drawn from the best bits we spy each week. But gosh, there’s a lot of chaff to get through before we separate out some wheat. A handful of you are lucky enough to still be covered by a decent borough paper, like Southwark News or the Camden New Journal. But someone needs to join this stuff up across the city and fill in the widening gaps — to cover all the news that can speak to every Londoner.
And every now and then a national paper like the Times, Guardian or FT puts out a piece on a London issue. But it doesn’t happen very often and they rarely go into much depth. We’ve just got one simple question: why can’t Londoners reliably have a big read to tuck into each week, that’s written for people who actually live in the city?
Our pitch at Spy HQ is that the problem is, in part, the way this stuff is getting funded. Volumes have now been written on the way the shift to digital advertising has battered local news. There’s still some scepticism people are up for paying for local news directly. But when we look at what we’ve achieved with the Spy over the past year — more than 4,000 Londoners now signed up, and close to £3,000 raised in day-one pledges — we’re convinced it’s possible to build a news magazine funded by readers in this city.
In March we’re going to give reader funding a proper go, by rolling out paid memberships for the Spy. Don’t worry — we know that’s not for everyone, and we’ll still send out free round-ups and features. But we want to offer something more — a new model for funding slower, detailed and thoughtful journalism about London, that’s supported by Londoners. We hope some of our recent pieces — going inside the campaign to kill a super venue, looking at safety fears in Soho, trudging to a burning waste mountain in outer London — give a glimpse of what that could look like.
What we’re most excited about with a paid Spy is giving other writers a home for their reporting — and paying them to do a proper job. An excellent bunch of freelance writers are right now putting together our first run of pieces, that will only be readable in full for our paid members:
London’s pub tycoons: The dirty side to running the city’s biggest drinking empires
Why is the best view in London behind a security fence?
Drama in the pews: The battle to be London’s oldest church
The rise of the noise complaint, and what it’s doing to London’s nightlife
We’ve already put a key piece of the puzzle in place for our launch — a fresh new redesign. You’ve served us well, generic spy emoji, but a copyright lawsuit from Apple or Google would be a really silly way to start the Spy’s next chapter, wouldn’t it?
Our first big milestone will be getting to 200 paid readers. Fingers crossed, that feels achievable, based on the support we’ve seen so far. 200 paid readers will put the Spy on sure enough footing to pay for a freelancer each week — and maybe a pint or two for the rest of the team, if we’ve been good.
What gets us really pumped up though is how much further we can go — 1,000 paid readers or, dare we dream, 5,000, like the Manchester Mill. With that we could pay reporters to spend not just a couple of hours with a London community, but be embedded for a day, a week or a month. We could pay for court reporters who are there for every twist and turn in a trial, not just the final summing up, and who follow-up with the Londoners affected. We could pay investigative journalists to properly cultivate sources in key London institutions, or visual journalists who can use graphics and maps to tell a story about the capital. And that’s just the journalism — we’d one day love to host talks and print physical things too.
We’re big admirers of the others who’ve had a punt at doing something different in London before us. We know many of you signed up to the Spy after being pointed our way by London in Bits, when the newsletter and its glorious round-ups sadly went on a break last year. We also loved The Roost, a short-lived publication that still managed to put out some cracking feature writing on London (P.S. did you write for either? Get in touch!).
We want to carry on what they were doing though, stubborn in the belief they basically had the right idea. Reader-funded papers and mags have been popping up in other UK cities in the past few years, from Bristol to Liverpool, and actually managing to make it. Why not London too?
And for those of you who have already pledged to the Spy, and given us the motivation to keep going over the past year, thank you so much. One day we hope to repay your early support for this newsletter. We genuinely wouldn’t be here without you.
That’s enough of that — the point is, a Spy 2.0 is coming in March, and with it a big run of fun, well-reported, and exclusive London stories. You can pledge a paid subscription right now using the button below, meaning you’ll be all signed up ready for launch. And we’ll be giving plenty of notice, in case you change your mind by then. We hope you stick with us though.
Cheers,
The Spy team 🕵️♂️
I live in london and used to have a radio show based on power of positivity eg only positive news affecting Londoners. It did really well 5000 listens here and in Canada! I am doing a MA. I would lice to write you a positive news column
Researching my PhD involved a deep dive into London local papers in the latter part of the 19th century. Blimey! Talk about coverage. I reckon not even a sparrow fell—to use a Biblical reference—in Islington without it appearing in the Islington Gazette. It seems crazy that we are far less informed about our boroughs—and especially council meetings—than we were 150 years ago, but it’s a fact.