Exaro

» see exaronews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

British political scandals reach Turkey as a headline with the middle removed. You get the name of the accused and the size of the number, never the eighteen months of committee hearings that produced either. So I had no opinion about Exaro while it was running, and the reason to write it up now has nothing to do with Westminster. It is about what happens to a newsroom that has exactly one source of money.

It launched in October 2011 with the slogan "Holding Power to Account" and a promise of evidence-based journalism, funded by Jerome Booth, a City fund manager who paid for it through his company New Sparta. By every account from inside, he paid generously and never touched the editorial line. Mark Watts ran it as editor-in-chief. The staff was small, six editorial people by the end, supplemented by contributors.

The early record is better than the site's reputation suggests. On 1 February 2012 Exaro revealed that the chief executive of the Student Loans Company was being paid through a private company in a way that cut his tax bill by tens of thousands of pounds. The next day the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was in the Commons answering an urgent question, and a review of every civil service contract was ordered. Working with Channel 4 News, it published a secret recording of Rupert Murdoch telling Sun journalists what he thought of the police handling the phone hacking case. It wrote more than twenty stories over seven months about a defense contract between an EADS subsidiary and the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and in August 2012 the Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal bribery investigation into it.

Then came the story that swallowed the rest. Exaro was the first publication to carry the claims of a man it called "Nick", later named as Carl Beech, describing an organized abuse ring of powerful figures. The claims went from Exaro's journalists to an MP, who raised them in the Commons, and from there to the Metropolitan Police, which ran three successive investigations ending with Operation Midland. Midland cost around two million pounds and closed in 2016 without a single charge brought. A subsequent review found the accused had been the victims of false allegations and the Commissioner apologized to them. In July 2019 Beech was convicted over those claims and jailed for eighteen years.

The site did not survive to see that verdict. On 20 July 2016 the owners called a board meeting at midday and closed the operation at five that afternoon. Days earlier the newly appointed joint head of news had told the industry Exaro was open for business.

~ the case file ~

~ what it got right first ~

The Student Loans Company story is the one worth remembering because of the shape it has. A single executive's pay arrangement is small and dull, and getting it requires somebody willing to read the contracts. It is precisely the sort of work that has no audience until the day it lands, and it landed hard enough to put a minister on his feet in Parliament within twenty-four hours.

That is what Booth's money bought for the first two years. Not scoops in the tabloid sense but the ability to spend seven months circling a Saudi defense contract while nobody clicked, and to be right at the end of it. Almost nothing in British media in 2012 was structured to allow that, which was the whole argument for Exaro existing.

~ the story that took it over ~

By September 2015 Private Eye was observing that Exaro had published essentially no news for months apart from developments in the abuse story. That is a fair description of what happened to it. A newsroom with a small staff and one enormous ongoing story stops being a newsroom and becomes a campaign, and the internal check that would normally ask whether the story is holding up gets weaker the more the outlet has staked on it.

The criticism at the time was not only from the accused. In February 2016 Dame Janet Smith called the site's editors irresponsible for publishing a leaked draft of her report into Jimmy Savile before it was finished. Watts defended the coverage then and afterwards, saying the site had never asserted the claims were true and had reported them in good faith. That argument has been made about a lot of journalism. The problem is that a claim published by an outlet with a masthead does not travel as a claim, it travels as a finding.

~ the board meeting ~

The mechanics of the end are worth recording exactly. A board meeting at midday and an operation closed by five, with a head of news, David Hencke, who had put up a story the previous day and had more in the pipeline. He described the staff as absolutely devastated. Watts, by then gone from the site, called it an act of mindless vandalism. He later won just over sixty-one thousand pounds at an employment tribunal over his own dismissal.

Nobody outside the shareholders knows exactly which factor decided it. Watts has said the commercial strategy rather than the abuse controversy was to blame. What is not in dispute is that it took one afternoon, because it only ever needed one person to agree.

~ what one backer buys ~

Single-funder journalism is the model everyone reaches for when advertising stops working. A wealthy person who cares about the public interest pays for reporters and refuses to interfere with them, and the reporters do work no advertising-funded newsroom could afford. That is a real gift. The part that gets skipped is that the same person can also stop, for reasons that need no explaining to anybody, on a schedule nobody in the building controls.

Exaro is filed here next to True/Slant and The Global Mail, and the pattern across them is the same. Reader revenue is slow and humiliating, and it answers to thousands of people rather than one. That is its weakness as a business and its entire strength as a structure. An outlet funded by one person is one conversation away from not existing, and the good work does not buy any protection at all.

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