The Ferret is the kind of news organisation that doggedly pursues environmental stories, such as pollution in Scottish rivers, while tracking the extreme right and keeping an eye on Holyrood lobbying.
Few national newspapers are willing even to entertain such a juggling act. It’s not just about political will but also the economics of journalism and how the cost of long-term, in-depth reporting is weighed against declining revenue.
Making investigative journalism financially viable is one of the toughest tasks in the media industry. Yet The Ferret has managed for over a decade now, despite the immense difficulties inherent to this project.
Much like the radical newsletters of yesteryear such as I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Ferret shows how an independent project can cultivate a loyal audience outside mainstream media through grassroots funding.
The Ferret has built its reputation among readers through the slow work of reporting on stories few places cover, such as environmental violations in fish farming and how Wall Street firms and China are “cashing in” on Scottish wind farms.
There has always been an audience for muckraking. The problem was getting people to pay for it, but this might be changing in a world where mainstream news is no longer trusted.
The economics of investigative journalism are always difficult to sustain. This is why the big establishment papers – particularly The Sunday Times and the Financial Times – are the only media companies capable of managing in-depth, long-term investigations.
The Ferret set out to build an alternative reporting model inspired by De Correspondent in the Netherlands and The Detail in Northern Ireland. The pitch is simple: critical reporting independent of big business and the state.
First set up as a media cooperative in 2015, The Ferret’s financial model was built on crowdfunding, grants and subscriptions of £3 a month (now just £5 a month).
“Join us”, a message at the bottom of the home page urges, followed by the publication’s credo: “Investigating the powerful. Challenging the establishment. Owned by you. Our journalism changes things.”
This model only works because serious journalists are involved.
In the beginning, The Ferret’s team included Billy Briggs, Rob Edwards, Rachel Hamada, Peter Geoghegan and Jo Skinner. Most of the original staff have since moved on. Karin Goodwin joined as co-editor alongside Briggs, while Edwards remains a crucial figure at the company.
The Ferret’s model also draws funding from grants, training, and events. This has helped it deliver the kind of investigations that national titles used to monopolise.
One such £100,000 grant came from the Omidyar Network in 2018, the philanthropic investment firm founded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire creator of eBay.
Omidyar is best known for financing the launch of The Intercept in 2014 through his joint venture with founding editor Glenn Greenwald, First Look Media.
There is no complete exit point from capitalism in the media industry. Even a cooperative must navigate the confines of the market as it tries to resist market pressures.
This is why survival has required more than just relying on grants. The Ferret has cultivated a membership model, not just a readership, with the Underground newsletter.
Members get the right to take part in The Ferret’s work, including what kind of investigations it pursues, as well as participate in the company’s annual general meeting. This broad approach to opening reporting to public engagement is unique in a profoundly closed, top-down media culture.
John Price, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sunderland University, found that this model cultivates a base of support more interested in public interest journalism for its own sake.
The Ferret is pitched to progressive readers still invested in journalism based on in-depth research and verifiable sourcing.
This may reflect a positivist view of news, but it is a valid perspective considering the prevalence of poor journalism. What Christopher Hitchens called “the ideology of objectivity” is relevant here.
The Ferret’s alternative objectivity is quite different to the BBC’s idea of impartial coverage. This approach is built within a wider progressive framework of left-wing assumptions about what’s newsworthy in the first place.
Not surprisingly, The Ferret’s subscribers tend to be middle-aged or older, with left-wing views, and have been thoroughly inculcated in that mindset.
In his article, Price argues that The Ferret was launched in response to three crises in UK media: democratic, economic and ethical. He claims that the project called upon the mythologies of journalism while seeking to offer a new version of reporting.
The preconditions for The Ferret to gain traction are clear. British tabloids like The News Of The World brought British journalism into serious disrepute—a hell of a task—with the phone hacking scandal. At the same time, the Leveson inquiry failed to deliver lasting media reform.
Meanwhile, a handful of companies still own the mainstream media, with billionaire tycoons dominating the newspaper sector. And this remains true despite the breakdown of journalism’s traditional financial model.
Concentrated media ownership has harmed democracy. But so has the decline of local reporting. Most local papers have been hollowed out, with many being turned into vehicles for right-wing clickbait and outrage porn.
All of this has created a need for new media. It’s why we’ve seen an explosion of alternative news outlets in the UK over the last 15 years, with the pace intensifying since 2015.
The Ferret was one of the frontrunners of this turn in Scotland.
In the Scottish context, The Ferret was part of a wave of new media to emerge from the 2014 independence referendum. Naturally, The Ferret fits into a small pro-independence media ecology.
Independent Scottish media has struggled to compete with UK national titles. But The Ferret does the job many national newspapers don’t do out of choice, because such work doesn’t fit into their model.
This includes collaborative work with The Detail on Ulster loyalist networks reaching into the British far right. For example, the two publications published an article on Christian nationalist Jim Dowson in July covering his efforts to support Scottish vigilante groups.
The Ferret has also reported on the presence of ex-paramilitary elements from Northern Ireland in Scottish far-right protests. This fits into a broader editorial agenda that spotlights Scotland’s rich and powerful.
Taking a critical look at the Scottish National Party over corruption charges is a key part of this. The Ferret is not a news organisation loyal to any political party.
Most journalists believe in the fantasy that the news industry is defined by its efforts to tackle corruption and misconduct. The truth is far less glamorous, with many journalists serving as courtiers and hagiographers.
Muckraking is one of journalism’s venerable traditions. Without it, the press wouldn’t have much to offset its churnalism, gutter stories and sensationalism.
The Ferret takes news values and reporting further than the average daily paper, despite its limited resources. It’s a rare case of a publication living up to the high standards of journalists who see themselves as crusaders for the truth.
Photograph courtesy of Subhash Roy. Published under a Creative Commons license.
