Thwarting the press barons — at a discount

Dear readers — a story from over the pond that you might have missed: two weeks ago, staff at venerated newspaper The Washington Post, woke up to an email from their owner, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. 

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” the note began. 

That change, Bezos outlined, was about the topics he would allow to be published in the viewpoints section of the outlet, whose official slogan since 2017 has been ‘democracy dies in darkness’. 

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” he wrote. 

Well, not any more. 

Instead Bezos instructed staff that they would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”. 

Personal liberties, writers soon discovered, had narrow parameters. Columnist of 40 years, Ruth Marcus, penned a piece lightly criticising the move. It was immediately spiked and Marcus resigned — following Opinion Editor David Shipley out of the door as a result of the policy.

This is the reality of the press baron. So much of our media nowadays is in the hands of very, very rich single individuals or big corporations. Press barons want influence. Corporations want profit.

Local news, for example, has been hollowed out in order to line the pockets of shareholders. At Reach plc, the UK’s biggest local news publisher, the last two years have seen 700 job cuts. Staff numbers are shrinking, while surviving writers are expected to churn out multiple stories a day, across ever larger patches. This is not a recipe for the in-depth local journalism that communities so desperately need right now. 

Barons to the left of us, and giant companies to the right. Readers are stuck in the middle. Step up independent media — like us. 

Since launching The Bell five months ago, we’ve made a pretty strong start, especially for a team with just two members. There’s been investigations into the murky finances of Glasgow’s bus tycoons, explainers about why the city can’t just buy back its historic buildings, and rollicking deep dives into the inexplicable beef surrounding lobbing a magnet into the city’s various waterways. We’re in the process of hiring a news reporter, so we can firm up our coverage even further. 

And we’ve already racked up nearly 470 paying members as a result of these efforts. These are our early backers — those who have seen what we’re trying to do and signed up to get behind us. To thank them, we’ve been running a 20% early backer discount on our memberships.

But to keep going, we need more of you. The Bell is a punt. We’ve made the calculation that the way we do journalism is something Glasgow wants and needs. To prove that — and to get us breaking even — we have to reach 1000 people on our paid tier by December. The next milestone is 500, which is just in reach and would be a huge morale boost for us.

Sadly, to achieve sustainability, we can’t run our discounts forever. But we wanted to give you, beloved reader, one final chance to join the exclusive club of early backers: those who recognised that Glasgow needed better local journalism and did something about it. So this is a final call: tomorrow, our 20% membership discount ends. 

Which means that if you don’t sign up by midnight on 15 March, you’re missing out on getting all our reporting, essays and analysis for an extraordinary £1.79 a week (if you grab a yearly membership). That’s less than an Amazon Prime subscription. And we certainly don’t have a billionaire baron telling us what to write. 

If you’ve been oscillating whether to take the plunge, consider this your sign. And if you want media that represents your interests, not those of mega rich individuals or bloated corporate behemoths, helping us become completely reader-funded is the key. Because then we are only answerable to one group: our readers.