Jonathan Heawood: Philanthropy and Public Interest Journalism

You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast with Rodri Davis.

0:12

Foreign.

0:32

Hello. You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, Rodri Davis, and this week I'm in conversation with Jonathan Hayward. Now, Jonathan is the Executive Director of the Public Interest News foundation, or pimf, based here in the uk. He was previously the CEO of the press regulator Impress. He's also worked at the Sigrid Rouse Trust as Director of Programmes and has been a journalist working for a number of outlets throughout his career. I sat down with Jonathan after we were put in touch a couple of weeks ago now to talk about the whole question of how philanthropy funds journalism and why, and particularly what it means to fund public interest journalism. So we talked about all kinds of things in a really interesting conversation. So we talked about how you define public interest journalism in particular and why that's important. We talked about what some of the key challenges are from the point of view of news providing organisations in the modern digital landscape, and what role PIMF tries to play in addressing those challenges and what role philanthropy can play. We talk quite a bit about why local news is particularly important and why it faces particular challenges. We talked a bit about whether there'd been any increase in the interest in the idea of funding journalism or news media amongst philanthropists and funders in the UK in recent years, and if so, why that might be whether it's a reaction to growing concerns about populism, the threat of the far right, or the rise of kind of myths and disinformation, and whether journalism and public interest journalism are seen as part of the solution to that. We also talked about whether there's still the case that philanthropic funders tend to see journalism in instrumental terms, and whether it's kind of a means to an end, so a way of furthering their own specific cause area, rather than seeing it as a kind of generalised public good in its own right, or whether that was shifting somewhat, as I've already said. We also talked about what some of the barriers have been, particularly in the uk, when it comes to funding journalism through philanthropy. We also talked about some of the risks and potential challenges. So is there a risk, for instance, that if we get more philanthropic funding for news media and journalism, that will undermine editorial independence? And how do you kind of safeguard, guard against that challenge? We also talked about whether there was actually a danger in the very idea of making journalism something that is an object of philanthropy. And that you kind of turn it into a charity case in some sense and thus undermine people's willingness to pay for quality and public interest journalism in the long term and whether that was something that you needed to bear into mind. And then we also talked about what we can learn from other countries where obviously the context can be very different. But are there useful and relevant things that we can learn when it comes to non profit news models and models for philanthropic funding of journalism? So, without further ado, let's get into the conversation. I think it's a really fascinating one, so I hope you'll all really enjoy it. I certainly did. And I'll be back at the end for the usual little bit of housekeeping. Okay, great.

0:37

Well, I'm here with Jonathan Hayward from the Public Interest News Foundation. Hi there, Jonathan.

3:59

Hi, Rodri.

4:04

Well, really good to have you on the podcast. Yeah, really looking forward to this. Really interested to hear a bit more about your work and the sort of backstory and dig into some of the issues around the intersection of philanthropy and journalism, which is a really fascinating area. Maybe the best place to start is if you can just tell everyone listening a bit about what Public Interest News foundation is, what you guys do, and how the organization came about.

4:05

Yeah, brilliant. Thank you. It's really good to have a chance to talk about this stuff with you. Public Interest News foundation, or PINF, as we affectionately call ourselves, we set it up just over five years ago now, and it came out of a previous organization that I had set up back in 2012, 2013, after the Leveson inquiry. So if you cast your mind back and remember, that first great eruption of concern about the phone hacking scandal led to a big public inquiry, which then began to unearth a whole range of issues about the ethics of the British press. Leveson himself recommended a new system of regulation to address that. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the newspaper establishment on Fleet street said they didn't actually want a new system of regulation, thank you very much. And the government said, and I agreed with them about this, actually it's not our job to regulate the press because that would cross a line. But nonetheless, there was this set of recommendations then hanging in space for what a new regulator should look like. So slightly madly, really, I and a group of others got together and said, well, let's build the regulator so we'll do it. Which we did. And then what happened was the big beasts of Fleet street did not join that organization impress that we set up. But lots of smaller, more independent minded news publishers began to come out of the woodwork and say, actually, you know what, we'd love to be held accountable for our journalism standards. We want to differentiate ourselves from big media of the past and we want the public to be able to trust us and to hold us accountable. So over the years, Impress ended up regulating about 200 of those smaller independent outlets across the UK, doing a range of investigative journalism, local journalism, maybe speaking to particular identity based groups that haven't been treated well by traditional media. But what became very clear over the years that I was building and then running Impress was that that sector, that emerging sector of smaller, independent, more ethical media, yes, they wanted a regulator. So Impress could offer that, it could offer some other services around ethical training and helping people deal with complaints and so on. But that's just a small part of the puzzle of how do you actually build a sustainable news organization in a really, really tough, hyper competitive digital economy? So that was the question that led to the building Public Interest News foundation, or PIM back in 2019, 2020 was like, okay, what else do we need? What other kind of organization do we need to take this really fantastic but rather embryonic and FR sector into something that's actually going to stand up and power on all cylinders?

4:28

And what do you guys actually, what role do you play in doing that then? Are you yourselves a funder or are you kind of vehicle then that can attract funding and distribute it to those other organisations?

7:22

So we do three things. Essentially what was very clear from the start was we did want to give ourselves the potential to be a funder or at least to be an intermediary. And that's something which is familiar, very familiar in the US and in some parts of Europe, bit less familiar in the uk, but nonetheless I think a really important part of the philanthropic ecosystem. So the dream is that we would over the time become a specialist journalism funder. So we have got the power that is written into our articles of association and we do do that. And we can talk more about the extent to which we have done that and we would like to do it a lot more, particularly in relation to local news. And again, we can come back to why local news is particularly important and also particularly charitable. So that's one pillar. But then alongside that we've realised that it's probably not ever going to be enough to solve the problem just to be able to access funding. I mean, I think it's necessary, absolutely essential, but it's probably not sufficient. So we also have a kind of a pillar that's more about campaigning and advocacy on behalf of local news, primarily with government, but also with big tech, with the BBC, with local government, and supporting independent local news providers to really raise awareness of what they're doing in their own local communities. So there's a strand of more kind of public facing work. And then the final strand is what we call our futures program, which is really. Because I think what I've realized over the years is people doing all sorts of jobs have the luxury of going to conferences and meeting people and reading all the magazines and the blogs and the substacks, and constantly listening to the podcasts, constantly hearing amazing, inspiring things about stuff that's going on. Maybe on the other side of the world, maybe just on the other side of the country, but the people we work with who are actually delivering local news on the ground tend to be really busy delivering local news on the ground and aren't even able to shout about their own successes and innovations with each other. So we just try to hold a bit of space through a blend of in person and online meetups where we can just share some of those inspiring examples and just try to encourage and support people to look over the horizon and think local news of the future is going to have to look very different from local news of the past because of the technological and societal changes that we're living through. But what's the best version of that? What are the really exciting, productive things that are starting to emerge that we could learn from, copy, emulate over here? So between the funding strand, the campaigning strand and the futures strand, in those three, we hope, complementary ways, the big goal is, over time, over the next 10 years, to regenerate local news in the UK.

7:33

Yeah, really interesting. And I think what you said there about having the space to be able to do that and to kind of keep an eye on trends and think about futures? I'm always struck by this in my work, that it is a massive privilege to be in that position. And you're kind of reminded when you talk to people who are doing work on the ground that they'd love to be able to do that, but most of the time it just can't afford the time and space to do it. And there is a real sort of responsibility that comes with it. So it's really interesting to hear that you're doing that. There's loads I want to pick up on. There's lots of stuff, I think, to be said about why funding for journalism might be appealing to philanthropists or to funders and kind of what different approaches they might take and what they want to get out of it. I guess just first I wanted to think about things the other way around and asking it from the point of view of news providers, particularly maybe sort of local or smaller news providers, what is it that's gone wrong with the model or what are the challenges that mean that they might be looking towards philanthropy rather than some of the traditional models around advertising?

10:32

Yeah, that's really, really important question. I mean, essentially the 21st century happened, we're a quarter of the way through it and it doesn't seem to be getting any easier.

11:33

No.

11:43

As we go. And the first big bang was the Internet. And the second, and in some ways much more important big bang was social media in particular. And then the way that social media has become massively concentrated in the hands of a very small number of just insanely big companies which hold all the cards in the digital media economy. So in the first decade of this century, most people in the traditional media, whether it was local, national, international, saw the Internet as this brave new world. And they very deliberately moved their operations from print to online. And mostly they very deliberately said, and it shall be free. So Whereas throughout the 20th century and before you'd had this print product for which people usually paid to access all the information that was contained within it, and therefore paid for the labor that had gone into creating that information somehow almost overnight, and it seems really without a lot of forethought, most of the media industry said, that's over, we're not asking the consumer to pay anymore, we're going to put it online because we think advertising revenue will more than compensate for the loss of subscription revenue. But because of this insane concentration of the online space and the fact that most of the spaces where people go to, to sort of go through gateways into the world's information is actually owned by Google or Meta or Amazon or Microsoft, those companies aren't interested in sharing the wealth with lots and lots of little news providers around the world. Quite the opposite. So what we've then seen is this 20 year process of a kind of attempted reverse ferret by the news industry saying, oh, whoops, hang on, when we said we were going to put it all free online, we didn't mean that. And they're trying to sort of reinvent the industry, but whilst it's all constantly running away from them. So that, that's kind of what, that's what went wrong. In a way, that's what happened. But just to tell it another way, at the Same time, this 25 year story is Also a really positive one because there were loads of things that were going on in 20th century media that were not great. You know, 20th century media itself was highly concentrated, dominated by, in the uk, particularly dominated by a small number of big companies which generally skewed to the right politically, deeply enmeshed in a certain form of capitalism economically, and tended to be led and dominated by white middle class men. You know, and therefore there's a whole load of blind spots that came with that traditional model of media. Whole load of experiences and stories that simply weren't told and identities that would be at best ignored and at worst actively traduced and stigmatized. So I think the way I see it is there's literally the best of times, the worst of times at the moment for independent media. The business model is really hard for all the reasons we've been talking about, but the opportunity to create space for people whose stories were previously ignored and to do different types of journalism that's much more community rooted and not so much just people in London telling everyone else what they should be thinking, but actually people in Caerphilly telling us what they're thinking and feeling. That's really exciting. So to bring a long story short, I think we find ourselves now 2026, huge challenges, but also huge opportunities, which is in a way where, why and how we come to the question of philanthropy. Because the business, the purely commercial business model clearly no longer works. But the social need is as great as ever and in fact the social opportunities are greater than ever. So something's got to give.

11:45

And just to follow up on that bit on the side of kind of what the interest from journalistic or news media organizations might be in philanthropy, as you say, they need some sort of alternative to the traditional model because it just doesn't work anymore in the landscape that we're operating in for lots of organizations. But when they think about philanthropy or become aware of it, is it basically that itself is the alternative. We need to shift towards defining what we do as a social good that then kind of attracts philanthropy and that will always then be the model. Is that we need to look to that kind of funding or is it more actually there is another model out there and we need philanthropy to help us get there. But there will be something that is kind of not the traditional business model, not straightforward philanthropy, but sustainable in its own way.

15:55

Yes, I think about 10 years ago when this crisis really began to be felt, there was a bit of a rush towards the first version of your question of people saying, oh, commercial model has collapsed. It's over. Journalism, particularly local journalism, is a public good. It should be funded in the way that other public goods are funded by the state and, or philanthropy. And that was why there was a lot of interest then, which we can talk more about in trying to make journalism, or particularly local journalism, charitable and attract charitable donors. Now, I think, not surprisingly, a lot of charitable donors actually became very anxious at that moment. There's a very small number of really courageous ones who lent in and did a bit of work in that space and tried to understand what was going on. But I think if what you're saying to the philanthropic sector is there's an industry which used to turn over literally billions of pounds and that industry is broken and we need to reinvent it and will you pay the bill please, in perpetuity? You know, the UK philanthropic sector simply isn't big enough and probably not stupid enough to do that. So I think what's happened is partly because, you know, philanthropy says no, and also because people in the sector, in the journalism sector have also had a bit of a deeper think about the issue. I think now we're moving much more towards the second option where I think a vision is starting to emerge of a viable future model, much more of a social enterprise model. So it's trying to find the third way between pure red in tooth and claw, you know, commercial model, or the risk of becoming a sort of dependent sector that just is going to require handouts forever and therefore be dependent to the whims of philanthropy as well. No one wants that. So I think there is a vision emerging and there's good evidence to show that this is a perfectly realistic vision of self sustaining local social enterprises not generating enormous profit margins, but at least covering their costs on a sustainable basis, largely from reinventing subscriptions. So I think the thinking these days is actually news providers were completely wrong to tell the public this is free, it's not free, it costs time and energy to produce. And actually the win win is if you can then demonstrate that and persuade people that there's value in what they're getting and therefore they actually could and should be paying a few pounds a month because they believe in it, then you actually align what you're doing even more closely with the community. So, you know, say you are in Caerphilly or Aberdeen or Gateshead and you do persuade people to contribute to the cost, even if it's very minimal, just what they can afford, you've got a much more sort of transactional, in a good way, you know there's an actual value exchange going on there, which there isn't if you're actually being funded by a third party, whether that's advertisers or philanthropists. So I think there's a general consensus now that that's the future we want to move to. But to get from where we are to where we want to be, there is a need for some kind of catalytic capital to come in and help all these social local news enterprises to actually build the revenue streams so that they can get to that better future.

16:45

Yeah, because I was thinking, as you're talking, and you sort of nailed it towards the end there, that actually there's the bit about not being entirely dependent on philanthropic funding, which is that there's dangers in dependency and so that's not desirable. But then actually there's a kind of active case to be made for the value of models that are based on subscription or some form of transaction. Because actually the people consuming news might value it more if there's, you know, if they have to pay for it. Because in a way, if people get something for free, the danger is that they're like, well, it's not really worth anything to me, is it? And then they'll come to sort of expect that and actually place less value in that, in whatever it is that they're consuming.

20:21

Exactly. It feels like a win win. And I think if you look at places, parts of the States, Canada, parts of Europe, Australia, where there has been some kind of what I would call catalytic capital, it doesn't have to come from philanthropy, it could come from social investment and it could come from governments, central or local. There's different places you might, you might access that capital. But there's usually philanthropy in the mix. But in most cases where it has been provided, you do see quite significant year on year revenue growth for the local news providers that are supported that way. But you seem to also see it's harder to quantify, but you seem to see an increase in their relationship with the local community as well. Because usually what's crucial to the success of those initiatives is, is a lot of deep community listening. This is not about marketing. It's not about saying, I've got a product, whether or not it's of any value, I'm just going to market the hell out of it and get you to pay for it. Because when you start that with a news product, as it were, as you can probably expect, there's a loss of skepticism and cynicism. News journalism is not highly loved in our culture. So if instead what you do is you actually go out to people and say, so what's going on around here? What would you like to know more about? What would you like to see being talked about more? What don't you know? What would you like some specialists, people who are really good at finding things out to go and find out for you and get people involved in that conversation, then they are primed to start supporting that initiative as it comes through because they actually, literally it is answering a question that they have asked. So there's a really, really virtuous circle. But again, you know, paying for the community listening, paying for the product development and yeah, paying for a bit of marketing so that people know that this thing is there and that it is, even if they value it, is still sometimes a leap people to understand that it needs to be paid for. You know, they just got so used to this stuff just exists in the ether. So there is a job of work there where, you know, as I said, chunky capital is necessary to get to the more diverse revenue streams of the future.

21:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you mentioned it a while back, but it feels like a good moment in which to kind of drill down particularly on the value of local news. Because it feels like, you know, in terms of what you're saying there, the relationship the news provider has from, with the people that it is providing that news to and the role that it plays not just in providing news but in kind of holding institutions to account and all these sorts of things. Actually, the local level, that feels much more visceral and obvious. I mean, maybe you could say a bit about, you know, from your point of view at pimp, why you've ended up focusing particularly on local news as something that's important and whether there are kind of particular challenges that local news providers face.

23:25

Yeah, so I mean, definitely particular challenges. And in a way that was, that was what first attracted our attention because as we began to feel our way into the space five years ago, we, as I said, you know, we worked with investigative nonprofits and sort of organizations that were creating journalism by, for and with specific identity based communities. And we found that on balance, I'm not saying it's easy for any of them, but if you're doing quite niche types of content, even if it's for an identity group, which only makes up a very small percentage of the UK population, nonetheless, a small percentage of a population of 70 million people could still be a reasonable number of people. You still might be addressing hundreds of thousands of people. So you only need to persuade quite a small percentage of them to subscribe and you've got a business model. Whereas if you're in a town of 30,000 people and you don't want to do niche, because the way that niche content usually operates in the digital economy is it can be very tribal, it can be very them and us. It's like, okay, this is our group. I'm doing content for our group because we are on the inside of something and we feel the same way about things. And you'll ever believe what horrors the Tories have got up to or Labour have got up to, click here. You know that that works. That's the sort of emotional attention economy that works at the moment. And as I say, you can do that even if it's very niche, if the niche is big enough. But within a 30,000 person town, if you're going to go for the little niche of sort of left leaning progressive activists in their 20s and 30s, you've got an audience of about 17 people. That's not going to work. And actually most local news providers don't want to go niche. They want to do something for the whole community, for the whole 30,000. That's what matters to them. So there is a particular challenge there about, about the business model, which is hard to crack. But then when you look closer at that, you think, hang on, this is really exciting. These people are trying to speak to all of us. They're not trying to go tribal, they're not trying to push our emotional buttons and play to our sort of fear of the other. They're actually trying to create a sort of bigger us, like that 30,000 of us that live in that small town. When we're on Facebook or X or Instagram, we're probably connecting with people on the other side of the world who look and feel like us. We're not connecting with our neighbors, don't look and feel like us. Local news reconnects us with our neighbors. I just think in a time of great polarization, to feel like actually local news could be speaking to the Labour voter, the reform voter, the non voter, the old person, the young person, the trans, the cis, the straight, you know, all mixed up. Because all we have in common is that we live on the same planet. And as it happens on neighbouring streets, that suddenly becomes socially really important as well. So because of that combined sense of massive economic challenge but massive social potential, that's why we zeroed in on local news.

24:09

Yeah, and obviously that feels particularly timely. I think what you're saying there about Sort of polarization. And I do wonder if that will be a window that kind of brings more funders into this area as there's lots of organizations at the moment trying to think, you know, what do we do in the face of kind of increased populism and the threat of the rise of the far right here in the uk? I guess to start on thinking about that, one thing I wanted to ask from the point of view of philanthropic funding for journalism or for sort of news media, I guess there's a version of that that's fairly well established, which is funders using journalism as a tool to kind of follow their own existing cause based ends. So the Gates foundation or others will sort of fund, you know, part of the Guardian or whatever to do work around international development or something like that. But that feels very different from the idea of we're going to fund journalism in the round or in a kind of broader sense, because we believe in it as a fundamental public good. So do you find that there's kind of work to be done to get people from thinking about journalism in very instrumental terms to thinking about it in those more fundamental terms?

27:25

Yeah, yes, I do. But I still think in some ways we could all agree that journalism is instrumental, but it's instrumental for democracy and for community at a local level. So in some ways, if you've got a funder who's already got democracy and or community as their sort of guiding principles, that's okay. We're already on the same page. If they've got environment or social justice more broadly, or economic justice or, you know, those kinds of causes as their North Star. I think the honest truth is that they are gonna, you know, if, if they are gonna come into this space, it probably is going to be for instrumental reasons. And I think we have to live with that. You know, I think we have a very plural philanthropic ecosystem. Sometimes I'm sure you feel the same, you sort of want to knock heads together and just think, come on, can't we all just at least agree on a sort of joined up theory of change? Even if we've got different places in it? It just doesn't work like that. There's too many different organizations with too many different histories, too many different individuals. I think we just have to live with that. I don't think we can change that. So I think if there are people who are for whom this is journalism, local journalism in particular, is already closer to the end points of their theory of change, that's obviously great. That makes our lives easier. They understand what we're talking about more instinctively if it's further from the end point, but nonetheless they could get their heads around it as a means to an end, as maybe a smaller part of their ecosystem? I mean, I'm delighted with that, to be quite honest. There's something that John Palfrey, who runs MacArthur in the States, who's been a really important figure of building philanthropic support for local news in the States, says he doesn't think local news should be everyone's number one cause, but he would like it to be in their top five. And I think that's an amazing ambition because you think in the UK it's nowhere near the top five at the moment, but to get it into the top five across a broad range of different types of funders would be a huge, you know, huge progress.

28:32

And have you seen in all the conversations you're having any sense that things are shifting a bit as a result of what we've already said about kind of increased concerns about populism and the awareness of sort of challenges around myths and disinformation and actually those being the things that bring people to, as you say, an instrumental view still of journalism, but one that lends itself to funding, not sort of specific cause based outlets, but funding local journalism or kind of, you know, broader based journalism organisations. Is that happening?

30:46

I think there's definitely a shift in mood and when I'm talking to funders at the moment or going to funder conferences, I'm definitely hearing a lot more people talking about relevant issues unprompted. And if I start talking about local news, people understand why I'm talking about local news in a way that they didn't really five years ago. So definitely movement. But I think it's, it's a bit like playing shove ha penny at the sort of, you know, the arcade. You know, we haven't yet reached the tipping point. You know, there's a lot of ha pennies in the machine and they're kind of building up. And you, every time you have one of these positive conversations, I feel like the critical mass is growing of, you know, philanthropists who understand, understand why it's important, understand that it might be a philanthropic priority, understand that it might even be there, you know, priority. But we haven't got that many that have yet actually fallen over the edge into putting significant resource in. So every year I have to kind of slightly gird my loins to go out into battle again and hope this is the year that we, we get it over the line and actually start to build some significant source of catalytic funding?

31:19

And are there, I guess, the other.

32:37

Thing you mentioned right back at the start, the question around the sort of the idea of having funding for journalism as a charitable purpose in itself. I mean, are there kind of practical barriers still in the UK when it comes to, you know, a philanthropic funder or a philanthropist thinks, oh, actually, I kind of get this. I'm concerned about a whole range of issues that mean that funding journalists, journalism in some form would make sense for me, but then actually sort of thinks, how do I do that in practical terms? Or will I run, you know, full run foul of the Charity Commission? Or is this going to, you know, is this in align with our mission as a funder and that kind of thing? Are there still issues that need to be ironed out? Or actually, is there kind of a gap between the perception of that and the reality on the ground?

32:39

Now, there's a bit of a gap between perception and reality, but it's not. But it's not totally mad to at least identify potential risks. So, you know, local journalism in and of itself is not a charitable purpose. You know, simply publishing journalism. What we did to get our. So PIMFF is a charity. We had excellent legal support from Stone King to help us secure charitable status. So we have a definition of public interest journalism written into our articles of association, which we're very happy to share with anyone who's interested. It's a pretty good guide. If you see a form of journalism that meets that definition, then you can be pretty confident that the Charity Commission would accept funding of it, even if the entity you're funding isn't a registered charity. So it's about accurate ethical information that informs the public on matters that are relevant to them as citizens, as members of a local community, particularly whether that promotes another existing charitable outcome. So if it's about health or education, for example, then you can be really confident. But even if it's touching on more contentious political issues, you can be fairly confident as long as the journalism itself is impartial. So, you know, charities, I think, are always going to have trouble if they want to fund very overtly left wing or right wing content. But again, that's not really an issue at the local level, because as I've said, most local journalists don't want to be tribal, they want to be inclusive. So that's one barrier which I think is, as I said, it's worth noting the risk, but it's fairly easily mitigated. Then I think there's just a couple of cultural Barriers and firstly it's just lack of familiarity. You know, just, just philanthropy has not had a lot to do with journalism in the UK over the years. Very different from the us so in the US there is the Press Forward initiative which has pledged at least half a billion dollars to rebuild local news. And there might be more coming, but that is in a backdrop where they don't have the BBC. So there isn't quite the same tradition of public funding, of excellent public service media. And as a result of that, over many years, particularly community foundations in the US have a long tradition of funding local non profit media. So there's a slightly. The us they're building on decades of experience where they're maybe not to the scale that they are now, but at least they would have a, you know, it was not so bizarre for them for a community foundation or individual donor or a bigger foundation to be. To have a bit of media in the mix. So there's a cultural, just lack of familiarity in the uk. I think the final problem is cultural, but it's more on the journalism side is that the people running local news organizations still have quite a long way to go in terms of actually articulating their impact, the value of what they do. So I was a journalist and I know that journalists, journalists tend to have this deeply held belief in the value of journalism. It's almost kind of just sort of inculcated in journalism school and when you start on the job, but actually explaining that to normal people is sometimes quite, quite difficult. And journalists are weirdly modest about it as well. So I think there's just a bit of a language barrier there between the kinds of impact stories that a funder would be exploring, expecting to hear and what is still a slightly vague. Yeah, we're here for democracy, we're the fourth state, we hold the powerful to account. That's the way that the traditional journalist talks about impact. So we're trying to sort of find a bit of a way of translating those two conversations to get people talking. So I think, yeah, there's some, there's some real and some.

33:22

Yeah, definitely. I'd love to come back in a minute just to ask a bit more about the, the US and what we can usefully learn from what, as you say, is a more sort of developed environment for philanthropic funding journalism. I guess one of the things I wanted to make sure I ask because I think it's a really interesting question that maybe doesn't get touched on too much, perhaps because it's in the situation where it would be A nice problem to have, but assume that we had more philanthropic funding for journalism.

37:20

What, in your mind, are some of.

37:45

The potential risks that might come along with that, whether they're real or perceived?

37:46

Because I guess we.

37:50

One of the things would be a sense that people might think, hang on a minute. If we allow individual funders to have too large a degree of sway over the sustainability of a particular organization, what does that do to editorial independence or the ability of journalism to hold those individuals to account or to hold philanthropy itself to account? Do you think those are kind of valid concerns that we need to be thinking through as we explore some of this stuff?

37:50

Yeah, I mean, again, not overwhelming, but I think, but nonetheless real and, and, and legitimate. It's. It's another reason why we established PIN as an intermediary funder, because I think there's. I mean, there's always potential in lots of areas of philanthropy for intermediaries to play a useful role. But I think here, particularly because one. Because that, that is one way of addressing one of those court concerns is if you've got a. A big philanthropist, let's say, hypothetically, this is someone who's made a lot of money, and they're either from a particular place or they want to go back to a particular place where they grew up, but for whatever reason, they got a stake in that community. Now, on the face of it, you think, hey, great local donor, motivated, rooted in the community, but nonetheless potentially quite a significant local public figure, maybe a big employer, maybe they've got relationships with the local authority, maybe they've got skeletons in the cupboard. Whether it's real or perceived, the idea that that person could be calling the shots at the local news outlet is probably not very healthy. So to have an intermediary to then take funding from a range of donors, dilute it, and then have the direct relationship with the local newsrooms to some extent, mitigates some of those concerns. I think the other concern, which I think is also real, it would be a nice problem to have. Let's not. This is not a pressing concern right now, but I think. I do think there's a little bit of this in the States where, as I've said, there's so much money now flowing into local journalism, I worry that in some cases that could actually lead to complacency where the newsrooms maybe aren't quite as hungry as they could or should be to actually produce. And I think, yeah, what worries me is that they're not as hungry to actually produce great journalism. And I think this is the thing about, you know, journalism, at its heart is a form of storytelling. It's not just a list of facts. The world is awash in fact date bytes of information. Great journalists tell stories. If you just know that you've got another check coming through next quarter for $100,000 and that's going to pay the basic costs. And you know, and you're doing it, and you know that the funder likes to see you covering stories about migration and asylum. I don't know, I just worry that you're not, you know, you're not actually setting the world on fire. You're just sort of keeping the embers glowing.

38:19

Yeah.

40:54

And it feels like is that there is sort of a healthy balance between the sort of version of everything's got to be about clicks and numbers and how many eyeballs you get on it, and the version where you've got some sort of philanthropic sugar daddy and you actually don't really. It doesn't matter to you, really, whether anybody reads the content you're putting out. Surely you want the middle ground to be. It's not entirely driven by, you know, what people want to read, but actually you want to be producing something that people do end up reading and that has value in it. So it's kind of, I think there's.

40:54

A sweet spot, isn't there? I think people get into this thing of saying, well, the public interest is not necessarily what's interesting to the public. That's a mantra you hear in journalism ethics classes and. Yeah, absolutely, 100% correct. But why not try and pursue a form of public interest journalism which is also interesting to the public? Because that's what's going to have most impact. You know, if I'm locking out beautiful, carefully researched, absolutely factual, important stories about the plight of asylum seekers in Kent and no one reads them. I'm not actually doing anything for that agenda. If I can do that in a way which actually gets people sharing those stories and talking about it, that's going to lead to real change. So I, I think there's. There's always a win. I think. I think funders, you know, a good funder should be cognizant of that. It's not just about putting out good stuff. It is. It is about actually, you know, changing audience thinking and behaving otherwise. I just feel like it's a sort of bit like vanity publishing.

41:26

Yeah, yeah. That's the danger, isn't it? We've mentioned a few times the context in the U.S. i'm just really interested Obviously you sort of made the point that part of that is that the history and the background is very different in terms of the existence of nonprofit newsrooms and it being a longer track record of philanthropic funding for those. But are there actually kind of relevant lessons we can take from the US or any other context where philanthropic funding for journalism is more developed or kind of healthier at the moment? And what do you think some of the kind of most important of those are?

42:42

Well, so I really, you know, I'm a big fan of a lot of the philanthropic funding in the US where it's been really strategic. So one of the things which I've always tried to model pimp on is something called the American Journalism Project, which brought quite a strong venture philanthropy mindset and raised significant amount of capital to back local newsrooms in order to become sustainable. So they are, you know, and some people might find that a bit distasteful. I mean, they are very focused on revenue growth, but they report that of the newsrooms that they're funding, and they tend to fund them over a three to five year period, but they're seeing year on year, 20, 25% plus growth. So that when they eventually are weaned off that funding, you've actually got a viable organization with a diverse revenue stream. So I do think a bit of that American sort of venture type mindset I think is really good. There are other things though, in other parts of the world. So in Lisbon, there's a local news organization that I love, which I don't know quite how commercially viable it will ever be. But what I love about it is that they do live in person journalism. So they're not just about here are some words on a page or pictures on a screen. They go into physical spaces with people and talk about stuff and try to do that in a really engaging storytelling kind of way. I'd love to see more of that in the uk. I think my instinct is that could go hand in hand with a perfectly viable revenue strategy, but you need the skills and dispositions to, to make it possible. So I think in different ways, I mean, so in some places philanthropy has been funding things which aren't obviously commercial, but seem really exciting and inspiring. In other places it's been funding initiatives which are potentially more commercial in order to make them independent and sustainable. So I think, you know, ideally in the UK you'd want.

43:14

A bit of both and just sort of final thing, I guess, or getting towards the end of things. And I will let you go at the time that I Agreed. This is really fascinating, but you mentioned up front that one of the sort of strands of the work that you do at PIMFF is around more kind of advocacy and policy work. Is that sort of essentially advocacy and policy work on issues that you think affect the landscape for journalism? Or is an element of that also about what you think needs to be done to get more philanthropic support for journalism or make that kind of environment more conducive in the uk?

45:24

Yeah, it's really interesting you say that, because it was until very recently, it's been all about local journalism and just looking at what we see as the barriers and the opportunities where central government has got some capacity to pull levers. The message consistently from central government these days is there is no money, but don't come asking for money. That's not going to go anywhere. So what we have been focusing on is more sort of regulatory solutions around big tech. So to try to stop big tech companies just simply sucking up all the content and all the world's attention and monetizing it, whilst allowing news providers to sort of wither on the vine which say, no, there has to be some sort of fair share of data and revenue that's actually coming through the Competition and Markets Authority is now empowered to start regulating big tech platforms. So that's interesting. We're going to watch that space very carefully. Local government currently spends about 70 million pounds a year across the UK placing public notices in local print newspapers. So that's anything when there's a planning application, change of use, road closure, according to a late 19th century piece of legislation, has to be printed in a. Printed. Has to be placed in a printed newspaper. Even if, you know, 23 people read that printed newspaper, and even if there might be a really fantastic, much loved online local news provider in the area. So we're trying to get that law updated because that's quite a significant amount of money that could be flowing in to the sector. And we're interested in the role of the BBC. The BBC. Fantastic. We love the BBC. Great national treasure. Let's reinvent it so it continues to be a national treasure for generations to come. And let's think about getting it working more in partnership with independent local news providers, rather than what's historically been a pattern of slightly uneasy competition where there's a risk of duplication. So those have been our policy priorities. So as a result of that, we talk a lot to dcms, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, where all of those issues sit. But DCMS is also interested in the Impact economy and social investment. And there's been a lot of work on that recently, which you'll be aware of. Some of that has now migrated to the Cabinet Office to host. What's it called, the Office of the Impact Economy. I think that's now sitting there. But DCMS still has a sort of quite a keen interest in that because it's relevant to so many of the sectors that they oversee. So there's quite an interesting conversation that's just getting off the ground with those players about what would a social investment fund for local news look like? Where would that sit in the sort of better society capital, dormant assets ecosystem? Who might manage such a fund? Could government actually put something into a fund like that if they thought it was one that they might eventually get a return on, rather than this worry of a permanent subsidy? Tap that. Once you turn it on, you can't ever turn off. So that's where we've got to. We got there partly because of this basic there is no money.

45:58

Yes.

49:23

Problem. But it was starting to get into slightly more interesting variant on there. There is no money.

49:25

There's no money, but is slightly more interesting. Yeah, yeah.

49:29

But there might be some money somewhere sloshing around if we can just direct it the right way. Obviously. Just finally on this point, in order to really access that money and channel it into this emerging local news economy, you do need there to be investable social enterprises in the local news economy. So what we're now focused on is building an accelerator program to try to bring some of those most promising initiatives to the point where they are investment ready. And then you start to get a bit of a pipeline of social investors putting a toe in the water, seeing what sort of returns they can get and hopefully, you know, build, build from there.

49:32

Really fascinating to hear. Like, it sounds like there's a lot going on in this area and just remain.

50:15

Say, Jonathan, thanks ever so much for finding time to come podcast.

50:20

It's been really fascinating to hear all about the work you're doing and just kind of the broader thoughts around the. The intersection of philanthropy and journalism, which I think is one of the most interesting areas in philanthropy at the moment.

50:23

I'll put links in the show notes.

50:34

To places where people can find more information about pimping and some of the things we've been talking about. And yeah, just thanks ever so much.

50:36

For your time and wish you all.

50:42

The best in the future.

50:43

Thanks Rodri, it's been brilliant. Thanks for all the work that you do in this space as well. Is much appreciated.

50:44

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Jonathan for coming on the podcast. Really great to have a chance to hear about his work and hear his thoughts on philanthropy and journalism. As I've said, I think is an absolutely fascinating area that will be increasingly important in coming years. I will put links in the show, notes to places where you can find out more about pimff's work and also some things that are kind of relevant to read. I'll put some things that I've written that might be of interest and relevant. But in general, if you're interested in thoughts on philanthropy and civil society, do check out the website at why philanthropy philanthropymatters.com Lots of articles there, long form reads, short form guides, news updates, all the back episodes of this podcast where you've got lots of interviews with interesting people and deep dives into various topics. So there's hours worth of philanthropy based fun to be had there. If you want to follow me on social media, you can do that primarily on LinkedIn these days. I'm also on Bluesky, but I don't put a huge amount of effort into posting on there if I'm honest. But give me a reason to do so and maybe I will. If you want to get in touch and suggest ideas for the podcast or people that I might be able to interview, do drop me a line. You can find the email address at the website. If you've got time, do leave us a nice review. Wherever it is that you get your podcasts, or even better, if you know somebody that you think would be interested in the podcast or get something out of it in real life, why not give them an in person recommendation? I think that really helps to spread the word, but other than that, just remains to say. Thanks ever so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

50:58

Bye.

52:34

Sam. It.

52:49