Another 250,000 readers found P&I over the past year. As our August fundraising campaign begins, we’re asking readers to help keep independent journalism free, fearless and growing.
When I started in this job 18 months ago, an independent media editor whom I greatly admire gave me some advice: focus on our strengths. Don’t try to build a more diverse group of readers and authors. And certainly don’t try to reach out to young people.
We dominated the over-65 group, he said. We should be happy with that.
He wasn’t being nasty. He was telling me to stick in P&I’s lane.
I was convinced.
For about 10 minutes.
His safe, essentially narrow vision didn’t match that of P&I readers or authors, and certainly not that of founder John Menadue or Editor-in-Chief David Armstrong.
Me neither.
The P&I community is loyal, vigorous and vocal. I barely had my feet under the desk before the letters started arriving. So many were versions of the same message: “Welcome, but what can we do to get more people involved, especially younger readers and authors?”
That mattered. Our existing readers weren’t asking us to protect P&I as something just for them. They wanted more people to find it.
The cheap and nasty response would have been to dumb things down – introduce some celebrity gossip and a few cat videos.
Apart from being entirely counter to what makes P&I great and different, it also struck me that this was exactly what younger people did not want from us.
The young people I talked to didn’t want to be spoken at or spoken over. They wanted reliable news and fearless commentary. They wanted to be part of honest, open debates. They were deeply sceptical of much of the mainstream media. They were incensed by the genocide in Palestine, afraid and angry about climate change, anxious about their economic futures, and they wanted to do something about it.
In other words, they weren’t all that different from the rest of the P&I community.
Building on the foundations laid by John and Susie Menadue – and urged on daily by John to do more and go faster – we started working in earnest to broaden the readership.
We reached out to more women, more younger authors and more writers from a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, aiming to build a community that looked more like Australia.
We worked on the quality and flow of the roughly 7000 words we send out every day. We did the unglamorous work of strengthening the website and daily mailing systems. And we put a huge amount of effort into presenting P&I better on social media, knowing that this is where younger people – and increasingly all of us – discover, read, consider and contest ideas.
And it is working.
Over the past year, another 250,000 readers have found P&I, with a growing number of younger Australians joining the community.
That makes me enormously proud. It also makes me impatient, because there is so much more we can do.
Today we launch our August fundraising campaign, and this is where you come in.
P&I has no corporate owner. We have no paywall and no advertising. We don’t answer to shareholders, advertisers or political parties. We answer to our readers.
That independence allows us to publish arguments that challenge governments, corporations and conventional wisdom. And keeping P&I free means those arguments are available to everyone, not only those who can afford another subscription.
But independence has to be paid for.
We need to raise $250,000 to keep P&I running and growing over the year ahead. That money supports the daily work of editing and publishing, the website and mailing systems that deliver P&I to readers every day, and the work of bringing new voices and new audiences into the conversation.
The growth we have achieved doesn’t happen by itself. Nor does fearless, independent journalism.
If you value what P&I does, I’m asking you to become a regular supporter if you can. If you already donate regularly, perhaps you might consider increasing that contribution slightly. And if a regular commitment isn’t possible, a one-off donation will help us towards the target.
Eighteen months ago, I was advised not to try too hard to take P&I beyond the audience it already had.
I’m very glad we didn’t listen.
You told us you wanted P&I to reach more people. We listened to you instead. The readership is growing, new voices are joining us, and we have real momentum.
Now I’m asking you to help us keep it going.
