My nine months reporting on the Big Help Project
My nine months reporting on the Big Help Project
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By Abi Whistance
You know that feeling where you repeat a word over and over in your head so many times it no longer seems like an actual word?
Over the past nine months, the words “Big Help” have felt a little like that to me. I’ve seen them written down on so many financial documents and heard them on so many long afternoon phone calls that at times I’ve wondered if I’m caught in some strange fever dream, or subject to a bizarre and elaborate social experiment. Thankfully, with the publication of my almost year-long investigation last week, exploring the many irregularities surrounding The Big Help Project, one of the fastest-growing charities in the country, those theories can be put to bed.
At the time of writing, 31,000 people have read that piece, plus many thousands more who read Thursday’s follow up, in which we dug further into the charity’s obtuse finances and unveiled a secret recording of Big Help boss and former Liverpool councillor Peter Mitchell making threats in a meeting. “Had you come to see me earlier then I’d be looking to chuck you off the fucking balcony,” he tells a business associate.
Meanwhile, our recent article about Legacie, one of the biggest developers in the city, using a notorious gangster as a witness to a land deal, is now our all-time top story. Again, it was a stressful one to report, but I guess that’s all part of the fun.
Larger local journalism newsrooms seldom take on stories of this scale. Why? Because they aren’t particularly profitable. The Big Help story took us nine months in total to report. At the time of writing, 66 people have signed up as paying subscribers after reading it. At £65 a year, that makes £4290 in total. Which is good, but it’s not going to get us on the FTSE 100.
It’s for this reason that a lot of the feedback we get about The Post is positive but sceptical. People will say they love what we’re doing — that they thought this piece or that piece was “like nothing you read in local news these days,” or how it reminds them of “how local journalism used to be” (that is, before three companies bought out virtually every title in the country and turned them into clickbait farms). “But,” they ask, “can you scale it up?”
That’s the argument we sometimes confront. That this is a good but ultimately inessential service. That to make it a successful niche is one thing, but to turn it into an actual viable model for local journalism in the UK is quite another. Because local news is free, right? You can Google “Liverpool News”, and Liverpool News will come up. It doesn’t cost £65 a year to do that. To pay for it is like paying for an expensive filtration system for your tap water. It will taste better, but is it needed?
Increasingly, I feel that people are waking up to the fact it might indeed be necessary. Because the current “free” model, funded by digital ad revenue, is collapsing on its feet. Reach PLC, who own the Echo, Manchester Evening News and a gazillion other sites, have been cutting back staff dramatically. The gap this leaves is enormous. It means that local communities — here in Liverpool or anywhere else in the UK — don’t have anyone scrutinising their elected politicians, their police forces, their Big Helps.
Our friends over at The Mill in Manchester recently met US senator Bernie Sanders (yes, we were jealous), who told them that the collapse of local journalism, both here and in his home country, was a “disaster for democracy.” Not long after that, the former Tory leader William Hague wrote in The Times decrying the “scene of utter devastation” in local news. Strange bedfellows, Sanders and Hague, but the point is that people of very different political viewpoints are realising what a dire situation we’re in. There has to be an alternative. We believe that alternative is reader-funded journalism; incentivising quality, not deceitful clickbait headlines and filler.
We know that not everyone will be able to pay for local journalism. Half of our stories are free to read for this reason. But without the paying members, there would be no stories at all. Our lawyers, our freelance contributors and our writers don’t work for free. Our office’s tankless reverse osmosis water filtration system (with alkaline post filter) didn’t pay for itself.
If you can afford to pay though, we’d urge you to. You'll not only gain access to all of our members' content, as well as invites to in-person events, but you’ll be part of a group of people (alongside Senator Sanders, William Hague and all of our lovely members) who are recognising a crisis, and doing something about it.