If you are one of the 12 people who has already signed up for The Ends of Britain, my planned weekly series of articles on the future of the UK, thank you! If not yet… here’s six reasons to become one of the 13 more I need to get this project off the ground.
1) You’ll get a say. Like most journalist, I am normally insulated from readers. With Beacon, each writer has a relatively small number of backers. Given you will be paying for journalism, I intend to provide customer service, such as answering questions and listening carefully to criticism and suggestions. Beacon backers are effectively joint commissioning editors, responding to a pitch, and influencing how it develops.
2) You get to read everything published on Beacon by more than 60 journalists, based in more than 30 countries, and those numbers are growing. Some write weekly (some even more), some prefer to file longer pieces less often, but there’s some very fine writing. You will hear about places and people in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, even North Korea via a deal with an agency founded by the former poet-laureate of that country. There are also specialists on the internet, higher education, endurance sports… and, to combine both, sport in Germany. Take a look here (although obviously I’d be grateful if you could subscribe through my page… thank you).
3) Beacon is a cleanly-designed website, without ads all over the place. It’s designed for the reader’s benefit – because the reader is paying for it.
4) Writing, along with other creative endeavours, has been hit hard by the internet. Beacon pays its writers most of the income from their backers, and does not have big fixed costs as it’s all online and the writers are freelancers paid based on their subscriber numbers. It’s designed to be a sustainable way of paying for journalism, without needing a vast amount of investment to work; an alternative model to one focused on advertising.
5) The cost is $5 a month, which came out as £3.10 on my last credit card bill. We’re so used to seeing journalism as free, any price can seem expensive. But Beacon is currently publishing (on the basis of the two dozen pieces in the last week) about 100 articles – most of it properly written feature journalism, rather than dashed-off news stories – a month for that $5, about 3p an article. You won’t read all of them, but you don’t read all the articles in a magazine that costs several pounds, either. The current issue of the Economist, cover price £5, has fewer than 80 articles, working out at more than 6p per piece.
6) £3.10 (or thereabouts) is all you’ve got to lose. If you don’t enjoy what Beacon has to offer, just cancel after your first month. (That alone means it’s up to me to convince you it is worthwhile.) You can subscribe for a longer period if you wish, without needing to cancel at the end – three months, six months or a year. Four of my backers so far have gone for a full year, which is a great vote of confidence. But giving it a go for just a month means you can become of the 13 I still need to make this work.
As backer Dan pointed out to me, the monthly cost of Beacon is equivalent to the price of a pint (a bit less at London pub prices). And which would you prefer, a pint or a month of insightful international journalism?
Please say it’s the latter…