How slow is slow news? 8 questions to Tortoise founder Katie Vanneck-Smith
Like ‘How many members do you need to be sustainable?’
Last month at Hacks/Hackers London we were joined by Katie Vanneck-Smith, co-founder and publisher of Tortoise, who answered questions from our director Federica Cherubini and our community.
You can read a summary of the Q&A below or watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.
Tortoise is a slow news startup that doesn’t do breaking news but talks about what drives the news. What does it mean?
Tortoise does three things. We do slow news, so the forces driving the news rather than breaking news. We think there are great breaking news sources out there but the world probably doesn’t need another one. But the other part of the mission of Tortoise is that we’re open and we’re built with and for our members.
There are two problems and we think Tortoise can be part of the solution: one is that news has become noise and the worst thing that in our opinion could happen to our industry is that people turn off. We think journalism really matters in a healthy democracy, so the idea of providing an alternative and antidote to the sort of constant scroll is a really powerful customer proposition. Secondly, we see that there’s a widening power gap and we think that people are looking for ways to get involved, to participate, to be part of the conversations and to be part of actually having the conversations that will change things.
We are a membership organization and members get three things with their memberships. The first is our slow news feed — we publish one, maybe two stories a day and they are 10–15 minutes in length; they are not breaking news, they are more thoughtful, they have pre-reading and further reading. The second is that we publish a short book of long reads once a quarter because like all great journalistic enterprises we still love print even though we are digital and mobile-first. The third thing is our ThinkIn, the ‘organized listening’.
What is a ThinkIn and how do you bring the audience into the conversation?
Many of us work in news organizations where we have our own editorial conferences in which the bigwigs get together, they close the door, have a chat and then come up with their point of view and publish their opinion. We think that’s brilliant but we think there’s a new model for it and the model that we’ve built is a mash-up of the leader pages and the letters pages.
Every day we host ThinkIns which is our model of organized listening and that is live journalism, an open news conference every day in our newsroom. For us, as journalists and a journalistic organization, it gives us a way of listening to voices that we wouldn’t necessarily have in our newsrooms so it takes us out of our own newsroom and out of London because we do ThinkIns on the road at least once or twice a week and the whole idea of a ThinkIn is that it is an organized system of listening so we’re there to learn.
What does it change when you bring the audience in and members have a say?
42% of our members are under 30 — our ThinkIn rooms are younger than most of the rooms that I’ve sat at The Times and Wall Street Journal. They’re more diverse ethnically and politically because we are apolitical, so actually, we do have as many Brexiteers as we have Remainers, which was a surprise and a relief because the whole idea of a ThinkIn is that you do bring together people with different points of views and that is what makes the conversation good. If we were to build a membership that was reflective of the echo chamber of London and our own journalistic sort of desires we might as well just close the door again and talk amongst ourselves.
The membership goes around a value proposition in which I, as a member, recognize myself. In a more polarized world, does it make building a membership value proposition more difficult? Can you build a membership proposition around the idea that this is the place for dialogue rather than the place for a specific value?
In today’s world, it is really easy to say what you are against but it is much much harder to say what you are for. Most brands are now polarizing around what they are against rather than what they are for. We are setting out to try and stand for some things that we believe in and those are more inclusive, they are more human.
In order to really be diverse, you have to bend yourself, you can’t just accept who you are and what that industry is. There is a certain type of customer who is prepared to pay for digital journalism. Actually, we had a much more diverse print readership than we have now in paid-for digital. So, how do you address that?
After a few months, we had 7,500 members but the main thing that was not working was the fact that whilst we were different, we were still professional classes. We didn’t have socio-economic diversity in the base, and that truly matters if you want to have a different type of conversation. That’s why we launched the Network.
We went out and we got brands, businesses, patrons who care about journalism and ask them to fund memberships on behalf of others. We now have 8,000 funded memberships and we have donated 3,000 of those and we’re working with brands, communities, charities and businesses who are working in those communities to make sure that our membership then also reaches out into parts of Britain and into communities that are at the front lines and sometimes are underrepresented in our journalism. You have to think up all these new ways to make sure that you don’t end up in another echo chamber.
How slow is slow? From a ThinkIn to a 15-minute read, how long does it take?
Last year, we had a ThinkIn on the future of men and we had it in New York. It was a great ThinkIn and at the end of it a guy said that we were actually talking about the future of white men and if we really wanted to talk about the future of men we needed to get up to the Bronx. So we went to the Bronx to have a conversation about the future of men. It was fascinating and it went somewhere completely different. Someone was talking about “the knock on the door” and we all assumed that they were talking about the police. So that guy told us: “I’m not worried about the police knocking on my door, I’m worried about family services knocking on my door and taking away my children.”
That triggered a look into family separation in the UK and our journalist Polly Curtis started looking into this. We found data that shows that one in five children in the UK is known and has been visited by social workers. So we opened a case file on family separation. The ThinkIn happened in May last year and we opened the case file in March of this year after a bunch of research. We have now had five ThinkIns up and down the country, we have a members panel who were born out of our member base who work in that and the case file is still open. So, it can be a long process. Equally, a fast turnaround would take probably one week from an idea to publication.
How many members do you need to be sustainable?
For the UK model, we’re looking at around 70–80,000 members to build a really meaningful, sustainable, profitable business. We are at 11,500 after three months.
How do you build in impact into your model? How can you reach people that are not members with your stories?
We are a membership business so if you are a member you can share our journalism with anyone you want. Every great membership organization is built to be shared. If you share any article from Tortoise there is no paywall.
You said you didn’t want to do breaking news because loads of other people do breaking news. But loads of other people do longform so what is distinctive about Tortoise from that perspective?
When we set out we said we were the love child of The Economist and Ted. We were trying to take the sort of longform journalism that we admire. There has been really good growth in longform journalism — the Guardian’s long read is amazing and their podcast of it is exceptional but it’s part of what people do and I think it’s the focus and the singularity of just longform, slow journalism and investigative journalism that is the difference. We’re not the only people doing live journalism, we’re not the only people producing books and we’re not the only people producing longform content but it’s the intention and the focus and the promise of going back to the consumer that is the difference.
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