Who funds us?

“People don’t like information, they like stories”.

This is a favoured refrain of our editor, Joshi. And it’s just as well. Because Glasgow loves stories. 

You’ve got your founding myths, like Saint Mungo and Saint Enoch, or the more recent urban legends like the Gorbals Vampire where Glasgow’s weans fought fog in the Southern Necropolis. There are stories which make us proud, like the Battle of Kenmure Street. The defamatory rumour (check Reddit), and the copy that’s been forensically pored over by the lawyers before it gets printed (check The Herald). Whispers in the pub loos and yells on Sauciehall Street. The tales lovingly dug up by the city’s chroniclers old and new: the Whitehats, the Victorian women’s football riot, the Stone of Destiny at a Woodlands pub, St Valentine’s bones and the Kelvin Hall hippo head. This city is bursting at the seams with stories. 

Our job, as we see it, is to tell them. We always do a rigorous fact-check before they get to your inbox — but we don’t let the wit and beauty get lost in the process. Because we’re not aiming to just give you information about Glasgow. We want you to feel something about the place we live, to know and love it better through the stories we tell.

The string pullers

A question we get asked a lot, by supporters and the more cynical alike is: ‘Who funds you?’. People are right to pose it. Money is power, directing who covers what, when and how. So, who are the shadowy string-pullers behind our little enterprise?

At the time of writing, there are 197 of them (help us get to 250 by the end of our first week). Right now, they’re waking up somewhere in this grand city, perhaps planning how to spend a lazy Sunday, or maybe pulling on their shoes to get a start on the day. These are our earliest backers, who have taken the plunge and decided to support us. You might be one of them — if so, thank you.

Of course, you need some start up cash if you’re going to run at a loss for a while. Our parent company, Mill Media, raised some money from a group of private investors to bring this model of journalism to Glasgow. Contrary to rumours — and it’s nice to see The Bell becoming part of that rich storytelling tradition — Rupert Murdoch was not involved. You can find who they are here; we’ve got nothing to hide. 

But in the long-term, we can only keep going, and growing, if we can stand on our own two feet. So this week we took the leap and turned on paid subscriptions. 

You see, we want Glaswegians to vote with their feet — or rather, their wallets. If you like what we’re doing, you’ll support us. If you think we’re serving the city properly, you’ll support us. If you believe the stories we’re telling are valuable to Glasgow, you’ll support us. If we’re missing the mark, well… we’ll soon find out. 

To survive, The Bell has to be supported by the community it reports on, and to. We know that might sound like a bit of a risk; after all, a recent study found that two-thirds of people in the UK said nothing will make them pay for news. But what we’ve seen elsewhere — in Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool — gives us hope. There are many people out there who care very strongly about what goes on in their hometown. That feels even truer in Glasgow, a city with immense local pride. We think — no, we know — that people will pay for quality local news, news they both recognise themselves and their communities in, and that brings fresh perspectives on the places they live.

In short: people will pay, not just for information, but for stories, we wager.

This is an invitation to be part of our story. We’ve launched our paid subscriptions with an initial 20% discount, to thank those of you who become our early backers. We hope to prove to you that it’s worth paying for. Right now, it costs just over £1.79 a week to support us, for which you’ll get a couple of extra articles every week. And if you have the capacity to give more, we’ve got a Super Supporter tier too. 

But the main point of being a paid up Bell member is that it makes our journalism answerable only to you, the reader, and allow us to do more of it. Once we’re breaking even, we can hire another writer to tell more of these stories. Right now, it’s a shoestring team of two at the helm, with a lot of help from our friends — but we’d love to bring somebody else on board. 

But maybe that’s too much information. Let’s get back to stories. Think about it: a local Glasgow newspaper bets the house on producing quality journalism, beats the odds and builds a reader-funded publication in 2024. Wouldn’t that be a tale worth telling?