The Overtake

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

~ the obituary ~

The Overtake wrote for British millennials outside London, which is a readership I have no claim on at all. It published out of Leeds for three years and four months, in a market I have only ever read about from the far side of Europe, and the nearest I ever got to it was its goodbye page long after the fact.

Robyn Vinter started it on 13 October 2017 and edited it. She had been working on the idea since 2016, and the people she pitched it to kept telling her they did not get the audience, on the assumption that progressive readers in their twenties were a London media phenomenon rather than something you would find in Leeds or anywhere else. The answer to that was a small Yorkshire site doing investigations alongside opinion. It worked well enough that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism carried its reporting on the state of the refuge system within weeks of launch, and Vinter was shortlisted for the Georgina Henry Award for Innovation at the Press Awards for the year it began.

The money came from advertising and sponsored content, with grants and reader donations underneath. Both halves of that had to be rebalanced constantly, because turning down the wrong advertiser costs you rent and taking them costs you the thing you started for. Vinter described the trade honestly at the time: there are no prizes for saying no.

~ the case file ~

~ it never left beta ~

The wordmark carried the word beta in small type beside it for the whole life of the publication, and the title bar carried it too, ending every page with the site's name and the word in brackets after it. The farewell itself was filed under a path with a tilde and the word beta in it. A site that published for over three years and had its work carried by national outlets was still calling itself a work in progress on its own masthead on the day it closed.

~ the last post ~

The farewell went up on 4 February 2021 under the title "Thank you and goodbye" and the subtitle "It's been a blast", and the trade press caught it the following morning. Vinter's first line was the honest one: it is very hard to end something that is not failing. Revenue and pageviews were both climbing every month, and her arithmetic said it could be a decade before the income would pay everybody fairly for the work they were already doing.

She was careful about what kind of ending it was. Nobody was owed money, the staff and the freelancers were paid up, and she wrote that she was not collapsing or being forced into liquidation but choosing to stop. What she refused was the moral other people wanted to draw. Told that an independent news website cannot survive in the current climate, her answer was that she did not believe that, and that any publication starting now had a better chance than The Overtake ever had. She went to the Yorkshire Post and then to the Guardian as its north of England correspondent. The site is gone, domain and all.

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