Guido’s still waiting with bated breath for any updates on James Harding’s twice repeated threat to go to law to force the Tories to reveal their membership voting data. It’s been just over two weeks since Tortoise Media warned CCHQ they were planning to initiate a Judicial Review over the Party’s refusal to answer questions about its membership, and since then, it’s all gone quiet. In Harding’s defence, a lot has changed in world since then, so maybe he forgot he ever sent the letter. Or maybe it just got lost in the post.
Then again, Harding’s also yet to respond to Guido’s own pre-judicial review letter, so it’s possible he’s got a lot of admin to get through first. Guido looks forward to hearing from him soon. The world is waiting…
James Harding is the former editor of The Times, who has raised a reported £20 million for his Tortoise Media “slow news” website. It is just like all the other centrist/ soft-left / remainer websites, so in an effort to distinguish itself from Prospect, The New Statesman, New European and Byline Times etc, he has today decided to try a move out of the Jolyon Maugham lawfare playbook. Harding is threatening to initiate a Judicial Review against the Conservative Party’s for their refusal to answer questions about its membership. This, according to Guido sources, is less of a refusal and, rather, plain indifference.A Tory source tells Guido “Pretty soon Harding will be donning a kimono. Any foxes in his vicinity should be on high alert”…
The pomposity of Harding is manifest, even so, this is ridiculously lacking in self-awareness. So ridiculous that even Jolyon Maugham, a man who triggers Judical Reviews as often as Guido has hangovers, has condemned it as futile and misguided:
If media organisations are now to be able to threaten private organisations with Judicial Reviews, Guido thought he should write to James at Tortoise Media and ask them where they get the millions they are wasting:Read More
The public via the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has awarded £50,000 to Tortoise Media, the online publisher on a mission to slow down and open up journalism. It has opened up journalism by doing things like (Guido has counted them) hiring 13 people who studied at Oxford University.
The public’s money is funding live discussion events called “Think Ins”, in local newsrooms in Grimsby, Plymouth and East Marsh. Co-conspirators who have attended tell Guido they are like a liberal hand-wringing therapy session. The idea, they told NESTA in their funding application, was to “pave the way towards a sustainable future for local journalism, based on real-life conversations in communities”. How sustainable is the Tortoise model of journalism?
According to a Guido source on the inside, everyone knows it’s not working and James Harding runs it like a private fiefdom. The same source says they employ some 60 people* with a monthly wages-only bill in the hundreds of thousands. They now publish two pieces a day.
The source says
“Its whatever James Harding is interested in, and so he’s creating a magazine for himself. But his contacts and world view are so 2008. His speed dial political contact is Andrew Feldman. Him and Matthew d’Ancona are like visitors from another era. Of their claimed 26,000 members, 6,000 are people who were part of the Kickstarter campaign before they launched, 5,000 are student members, 14,000 are ‘network members’ which is a bulk buying scam where corporates buy cheap memberships for disadvantaged people who supposedly don’t have access to good media, and then they of course never log on. And 1,000 proper members, who actually read the site. Articles normally get reads measured in the hundreds, thousands is like hallelujah.”
Guido ran a comparison a few months ago which supporters said was unfair and not comparing like-with-like, so we have repeated the comparison with a like-for-like: Unherd, another not-for-profit online publisher that was also founded to do more highbrow journalism not covered so well elsewhere. Over the last 90 days this is how they have done in terms of reader visits, with only a handful of staff Unherd is beating Tortoise in readership terms by a factor of ten:
That chasm in reader numbers is not narrowing, the month of February was just as dire:
Two months ago co-founder Katie Vanneck-Smith told Guido Tortoise had 19,470 paying members, which if true would mean they visit the site on average less than once every two weeks.In reality much of their registered readership must live in the village of Potemkin…
Media grand panjandrum, James Harding, was just onPolitics Live lauding the merits of Tortoise Media and the untapped demand for slow news. Despite all their millions raised, wall-to-wall coverage in the broadsheets and endless boosting from the BBC, “Centrist Dad Media” is not winning readers.
According to analytics data from SimilarWeb their visitor numbers are barely a few thousand a day. Guido regularly gets more traffic in one day than they do in months and our readers stay on our site for longer on average than Tortoise readers.
They will no doubt point out quite fairly that Guido has been around for fifteen years whereas they have been around just a year. Or they will claim that most of their traffic is via their app – which has been downloaded a few thousand times. Or that is building a “membership model”. Whatever.
Let’s gloss over that Cadwalladrish article that intimated that Steve Bannon was guiding Boris Johnson’s campaign for the Tory leadership. Guido thought Tortoise were supposed to be countering “fake-news”…
It is a surprisingly resilient myth that there is an untapped audience crying out for boring, long-winded centrist content. Readers wanting longer articles already have Prospect Magazine for that or on the right StandPoint Magazine. Both publications lose more money than they have readers.
Guido’s iron rule of online media is that in the main those that have financial backing from patrons or venture capitalists lose money – because they can. Publications that survive only on the revenue they generate are successful and better reads – because they have to be. Britain has a number of digital publishing successes; Lad Bible, PinkNews and Mumsnet spring to mind. Profit is the only guarantee of sustainability and independence…
