The Global Mail

» see theglobalmail.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

News is national even when it is on the open web. That sounds obvious and it is the thing everyone in 2012 kept forgetting, including me. Every newspaper on earth became reachable from Ankara at the same moment, and not one of them became relevant to me because of it. An Australian nonprofit newsroom writing long pieces about Australian asylum policy was a real and serious publication that had no path to my browser, and no amount of open access changes that.

The Global Mail launched on 6 February 2012 with money from Graeme Wood, who had made a fortune founding the hotel booking site Wotif.com. The terms were unusually clean for a media startup. No advertising, no paywall, no membership drive, and a stated commitment to fund the thing for five years. Monica Attard, a former ABC journalist, was the founding editor and was gone about three months later, replaced eventually by Jane Nicholls as chief executive with Lauren Martin running the newsroom.

What it produced in two years was not thin. It built data journalism tools for Australian voters at federal election time and partnered with OpenAustralia.org on searching the parliamentary record. Its investigations ran with The Guardian, CNN International, Time and others. In July 2013 it became the first institutional member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, paid for out of a separate three-year grant from the same funder worth one and a half million US dollars. Its photographers won the 2013 Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year, and Ella Rubeli took Walkley Young Journalist of the Year the same year.

In January 2014, less than two years into the five, Wood told the staff he was stopping. The ABC reported it on 30 January. By the end of February the homepage said the site had ceased operations, and the archive stayed up as the only thing left.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

A newsroom with one revenue source has a lifespan equal to the attention span of whoever controls that source. The Global Mail had exactly that, by design and with good intentions on both sides. Refusing advertising bought editorial independence from advertisers and cost editorial independence from the one person paying, which is not usually how the trade gets described when the money is still arriving.

The deeper problem was that it never built the muscle. Two years without a subscription page or a donations drive means two years of not learning how to ask readers for money, so when the funding stopped there was no list to write to and no habit to fall back on. The staff had weeks to find an alternative and found nothing.

~ the part that stings ~

In January 2013, eleven months into the five-year commitment, Wood was named as a backer of The Guardian's new Australian operation. Guardian Australia launched that May, free to read, aimed at broadly the same readers who cared about the same subjects. The funder had not left journalism. He had started a second, larger publication for the same audience while still paying for the first one.

Nobody involved described it as a choice between the two, and it may not have been. It is still the sequence of events, and it is the part that anyone taking philanthropic money should read twice.

~ the legacy ~

The Australian nonprofit newsroom idea did not die with it. What died was one specific version of the idea, the version where a single wealthy person underwrites an entire newsroom out of conviction and the newsroom does no fundraising of its own. Everything that has worked since runs on many small payments, because a thousand donors who each give a little cannot all change their mind in the same month.

The distinction that matters is between a pledge and an endowment. A pledge is a plan. An endowment is money that has already changed hands and cannot be recalled when the person who gave it finds something else worth building.

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