Background
Byline Investigates
In 2014, two former News of the World reporters convicted for phone hacking in the aftermath of the News International scandal, Graham Johnson and Dan Evans, were approached during their respective trials by Evan Harris, [3] the associate director of Hacked Off and a veteran campaigner for the group. [4] [5] Johnson held discussions with Harris and Max Mosley, receiving an offer of collaboration in the press reform movement spearheaded by Mosley (a major sponsor of Hacked Off and the independent press regulator IMPRESS [6] [7] [8] ) and Hugh Grant (the founder of Hacked Off as a separate entity in 2012 [9] ). [3]
Johnson and Evans proceeded to set up a crowdfunded "guerrilla journalism" website called Byline Investigates that supplied material to lawyers pursuing allegations of press intrusion against tabloid newspapers. [3] Johnson was reported to have offered cash and other incentives around 2016 to ex-journalists in exchange for testimonies and documents on alleged malpractice in media conglomerates, triggering lawsuits against the tabloid press from Elizabeth Hurley, Elton John and Prince Harry, among others. [10] Byline Investigates became regulated by IMPRESS in September 2016. [11] In June 2020, Johnson's domestic partner Emma Jones joined the board of Hacked Off. [12] [3] Byline Investigates Holdings was incorporated as a Greenwich-based limited company by Johnson and Evans in July 2021, [13] and converted to a community interest company in January 2023. [14] As of 2023, Byline Investigates was run by Johnson as a sister website of Byline Times. [10] [1]
After jointly registering the Greater Manchester-based company Byline Media Ltd in October 2014, [15] the British entrepreneur Daniel Tudor and his South Korean colleague and fellow University of Oxford alumnus Lee Seung-yoon launched the crowdfunded media platform Byline.com that allowed "campaigning journalists" to make direct appeals to readers in April 2015. [16] [17] In May 2015, Byline.com ran a controversial interview with Graham Johnson. [18] By July 2015, it had 300,000 monthly visitors, and raised $850,000 in seed funding led by Lee Seung-yoon's mentors, Kakao Corporation's founder Lee Jae-woong and Berggruen Institute's chairman Nicolas Berggruen, as well as Guancha founder Eric X. Li and the investor Ian Osborne. [19] [20] [21] Its writers included Julie Bindel, Beatrix Campbell, Norman Finkelstein, John Mitchinson, Benny Morris, Rowan Pelling and Abby Tomlinson of Milifandom, while the board of advisers was made up by the former editor-in-chief of The Economist Bill Emmott, the former editor-in-chief of The Sunday Times Harold Evans, and the playwright Peter Jukes who had joined as a columnist. [19] [18] [22] [21]
Peter Jukes and the Saatchi & Saatchi marketing executive Stephen Colegrave took over the Byline.com website in 2016. [17] [1] [23] In April 2016, Jukes registered a new Barnet-based company under the name Byline Media Holdings Ltd, [24] in which Max Mosley took up shares by April 2017 [25] [26] (he retained them until his death [27] ). In June 2017, Jukes and Colegrave inaugurated the Byline Festival at the former military ground in Pippingford Park in East Sussex as a "parallel revenue stream" for the website; [17] the event also received support from Mosley. [28] In December 2017, Graham Johnson was appointed a director of Byline Media Holdings. [29] As of May 2019, the website had a monthly audience of 150,000 and hosted the investigations of Graham Johnson and Dan Evans into the "dark practices highlighted at the Leveson inquiry". [17]
Byline Times
In November 2018, Peter Jukes and Stephen Colegrave registered Byline Times Ltd as a Birmingham-based company, with 51% shares held by LC Nominees Ltd, a firm headquartered in the same city. [30] In February 2019, Byline Times moved to the same Southwark address from which Byline Investigates has operated since at least 2021. [31] [32] The print newspaper Byline Times was then launched in the summer of 2019, with an initial subscriber base of almost 1,000. [17] By November 2021, Byline Times had separated from Byline Investigates and Byline.com. [26]
Operations
The Byline Times newspaper is published monthly for subscribers, with three-quarters of the material restricted to print, [33] while BylineTimes.com functions as a free news site. Byline Times's sister organisations are the former crowdfunding journalism platform Byline.com, investigative unit Byline Investigates, the Byline Times Podcast, Byline Books and the annual summer event Byline Festival. All are separate entities. [34]
Byline Times is also published by Bywire News , an "independent blockchain news network", whose other partners include The Canary , Labour Buzz, Not the News, Business Wales, Our.London, and Media Reform Coalition (MRC) [35] which, according to Bywire, means "each article contains a record on the blockchain detailing when it was created, by whom, and any revisions which are made and when". [36] In 2020, Byline Media collaborated with George Llewelyn and Caolan Robertson to create Byline TV, a subscriber-funded video channel. [37]
Recent expansions of the outlet include the 2022 launch of Byline Supplement, the outlet's additional Substack newsletter, [38] and Byline Audio, set up in 2024 to bring together the outlet's podcasts. [39]
As of July 2023, Byline Times had 29,000 paying subscribers, of which 15,000 to the print version, and a revenue of approximately £1m. [1]
In March 2025, it became regulated by the UK's official press regulator IMPRESS. [40]
Staff
The editor of Byline Times is Hardeep Matharu. [41] Other writers and staff include its Special Investigations Reporter Nafeez Ahmed, former Spectator political columnist Peter Oborne, former BBC journalist Adrian Goldberg who hosts the Byline Times Podcast, [2] [34] former BBC Panorama reporter John Sweeney [42] , Kingston University's professor of journalism Brian Cathcart, [43] investigative journalist Iain Overton, [44] Compass director Neal Lawson, [45] and author Otto English. The paper has also had contributions from others, including the actor and comedian John Cleese. [46]
As of August 2024, Byline Times' full-time reporting team included Political Editor Adam Bienkov, and Chief Reporter Josiah Mortimer. [47] The title employed 12 permanent staff members, had 30 writers on monthly retainer and 500 freelancers to call upon, [33] which represented an increase from 5 permanent staffers and 15 regular columnists in July 2023. [1]
Purpose
Interviewed in 2019, Matharu described the purpose of Byline Times as to "really dig down and investigate [...] pressing social issues, many of them to do with justice, or a lack of, which for one reason or another are not being widely or extensively reported on elsewhere." Jukes described the newspaper as providing "what the [other] papers don't say" and said it would be similar in tone to the broadsheet news magazine FT Weekend . [48]
Peter Jukes told Press Gazette in 2023 that the outlet was "not politically aligned" and "not ideological", while professing a belief in liberal democracy, transparency and tackling corruption. [1]
Reception
Byline Times was showcased at the 2019 Trust in Journalism Conference, organised by IMPRESS. [49] In February 2024, it was described by NewsNow Publishing in a testimony made to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee as a "successful example of non-local reader-funded 'alternative' news media outlet", alongside Double Down News and Declassified UK. [50]
Mike Berners-Lee judged Byline Times to have "a very credible set of journalists" and stated that he "couldn't think of an example of it having been factually wrong", although he expressed a wish for its sources to be cited more frequently. He described it as a "counter-balance to the billionaire-dominated British press". [51]
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