We're still collecting donations
On the 17th October 2023 we'd raised £62 with 3 supporters in 56 days. But as every pound matters, we're continuing to collect donations from supporters.
UK television news is broken. If news is broken, democracy is broken too. We want to fix it with a new news channel based on trust & truth.
by Justin Bellinger in London, Greater London, United Kingdom
On the 17th October 2023 we'd raised £62 with 3 supporters in 56 days. But as every pound matters, we're continuing to collect donations from supporters.
Hi, I'm Justin and I want to fix the news.
The right-wing media have GB News & TalkTV and a whole swathe of newsprint.
The left have a lot of online outlets, and a couple of newspapers.
The middle ground has Byline, The London Economic, and a few others.
But Ofcom research shows that nearly 90% of the population gets its news from a broadcast channel - on whatever device and service that news is put on. That's why the biased press is winning the fight for government narrative and disinformation, and the excellent work of competing papers and online aren't getting through.
We can do so much better. We have to, or they win.
The best way to do that is run a news channel to compete, so we can actually hold power to account, not just back it to the hilt, no matter what they've done wrong.
The negative is, running a news channel won't make money, so it's almost impossible to raise equity to do so. But I've found a way to do this where it can run at breakeven (and maybe, if we can get big enough, in the future we might do better), so we don't need to worry about doing so, if we can raise a small amount via crowdfunding.
The vision is to hold not just power to account, but the right-leaning press to account too (and, for that matter the left-leaning press if they get it wrong). The only way to clean up news in the UK is to challenge it, and do so in such a way you win.
It's a grand ambition, because there will be no prizes for second place on this, but if we don't try, we just let them win.
Not on my watch.
So, we're looking for that 'get it off the ground' money. We need it to engage a specialists to pre-sell programme sponsorship to startup the news channel (and the plan is then to raise a bond once up and running - so we can become self-sustaining, and not need to keep asking people for money).
The medium-term stability plan is to cross promote the news on a general entertainment channel, where the programming is sold to help fund the news service. Just like the BBC does with BBC Studios, but on a smaller scale.
Our goals are big, our impact aims to be bigger.
At the end of the day, what price can you put on honest, truthful news that leads to a stronger democracy?
Thank you for reading this far, and thank you for any help and support you are able to give.
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