 | |
Type of site | Commentary |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 21 July 2017 |
| Headquarters | London , UK |
| Owner | Sir Paul Marshall |
| Editor | Freddie Sayers (Editor-in-Chief & CEO) |
| URL | unherd.com |
| Current status | Active |
UnHerd is a British news and opinion website founded in July 2017, which describes itself as a platform for slow journalism.
UnHerd was founded in 2017 by Sir Paul Marshall as owner and publisher, and conservative British political activist Tim Montgomerie as editor. [1] [2] Marshall has invested over £50m in GB News; Unherd's marketing describes it as a website for "people who dare to think for themselves." [3]
The website initially existed without a paywall, as it is funded by an endowment from Marshall. [4] [5] [6] In 2017, New Statesman reported that the site intended to introduce paid services. [7] In May 2020, the site said that it intended to switch to a subscription model later that year. [5] As of October 2022 [update] , it offers readers a limited number of articles for free. [8]
Following Montgomerie's departure in September 2018, [9] journalist Sally Chatterton, who previously wrote for The Daily Telegraph and The Independent , took over as editor. [10] [6]
Freddie Sayers joined the magazine in 2019 as executive editor, having previously been editor-in-chief of YouGov and co-founder of the British news and current affairs website Politics Home . [11]
In November 2022, UnHerd opened a private members' club and restaurant in Westminster, named the Old Queen Street Cafe. Talks and debates at the club are broadcast on UnHerd's YouTube channel. [1]
UnHerd's columnists include Giles Fraser, Aris Roussinos, Kat Rosenfield, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Patrikarakos, Terry Eagleton, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, Lionel Shriver, Matthew Crawford, Helen Thompson, Freddie deBoer, Tanya Gold, Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock. [12]
In January 2023, former Politico and The Atlantic writer Tom McTague was hired as UnHerd's political editor. [13]
In 2021, an UnHerd piece criticising the World Health Organization (WHO) for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory in its investigation was marked by Facebook with a "false information" tag; Facebook apologised after UnHerd objected. In an opinion piece about the incident, Financial Times columnist Jemma Kelly noted that three days later the White House expressed "deep concerns" about the WHO investigation. [14]
In a February 2022 UnHerd piece, Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman wrote that her paper was allowing itself to be bullied over transgender issues. [15] [16]
In July 2022, UnHerd reported that the Ukrainian government's Center for Countering Disinformation had compiled a list of politicians and intellectuals in multiple countries whom they believed were promoting Russian propaganda. [17] [18] The list included US senator Rand Paul, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military analyst Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, as well as the former chair of the Indian National Security Advisory Board. [19] [20] The UnHerd report included responses from Luttwak, Mearsheimer, and Greenwald. [17]
 | This section needs to be updated.(August 2023) |
When the site was launched in July 2017, Simon Childs in Vice was critical of the underlying premise, saying: "The social media news cycle can be a jading stream of ill-informed narcissists, but it's refreshing to be reminded that at least it offers a more diverse outlook than Tim Montgomerie funded by an oligarch publishing the kind of people who are generally 'unheard' because people edge away from them at parties." [21] Jasper Jackson writing for the New Statesman was also sceptical of UnHerd's promotion of slow journalism, saying "the idea UnHerd is offering a groundbreaking solution to information overload is faintly ludicrous." [7]
In 2020, Ian Burrell, writing in the i , noted that UnHerd pieces can be 2,000 words in length, presenting "nuance and context" in science articles and pursuing an "approach to digital journalism [that] is counter to the notion that only extreme views can generate traffic"; he compared the website to Tortoise Media, another "slower-paced news experiment that defies the catch-all notion of the media." [5]
John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
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Timothy Montgomerie is a British political activist, blogger, and columnist. He is best known as the co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice and as creator of the ConservativeHome website, which he edited from 2005 until 2013, when he left to join The Times. He was formerly the newspaper's comment editor, but resigned in March 2014. On 17 February 2016, Montgomerie resigned his membership of the Conservative Party, citing the leadership's stance on Europe, which was then supportive of EU membership. In 2019, he was briefly a special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, advising on social justice issues.
Russian web brigades, also called Russian trolls, Russian bots, Kremlinbots, or Kremlin trolls are state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Russian government. Participants report that they are organized into teams and groups of commentators that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums using sockpuppets, social bots, and large-scale orchestrated trolling and disinformation campaigns to promote pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda.
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Sir Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall is a British hedge fund manager and philanthropist. According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, he had an estimated net worth of £630 million. In 2024, he topped The Sunday Times Giving List, having donated £145.1 million over 12 months to various charities.
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The Daily Telegraph, known online and elsewhere as The Telegraph, is a British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier. The Telegraph is considered a newspaper of record. The paper's motto, "Was, is, and will be", was included in its emblem which was used for over a century starting in 1858.
Tulsi Gabbard is an American politician, United States Army Reserve officer, and conservative political commentator who served as U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. She became the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. A then-member of the Democratic Party, she was a candidate for its nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election; she left the party in October 2022 to become an independent politician.
David Patrikarakos is a British author, journalist and war correspondent, best known as the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
Euromaidan Press (EP) is an English-language news website launched in 2014 by contributors from Ukraine, sponsored by reader contributions and the International Renaissance Foundation. It shares its name with the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine. Registered as a non-governmental organization, EP's stated goal is to provide English-language material to those interested in Ukrainian topics such as business issues, the economy, military conflict, and tourism.
During Tulsi Gabbard's tenure as a congresswoman and presidential candidate, she placed much emphasis on her foreign policy views and regarded them as inseparable from her domestic policy views. She criticizes what she terms the "neoliberal/neoconservative war machine", which pushes for US involvement in "wasteful foreign wars". She has said that the money spent on war should be redirected to serve health care, infrastructure, and other domestic priorities. Nevertheless, she describes herself as both a hawk and a dove: "When it comes to the war against terrorists, I'm a hawk", but "when it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I'm a dove".
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Ian Birrell is a British journalist and former speechwriter to Prime Minister David Cameron. He has been a columnist at several newspapers including the i and UnHerd. From 1998 to 2010, Birrell was deputy editor-in-chief of The Independent.
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