We don’t often make pleas for donations on the Daily Sceptic, but I wanted to tell you about some exciting plans we’ve got for the site and to ask readers to dip into their pockets to help us make this a reality.
Donations from readers are more or less our only source of revenue. Thanks to being black-listed by Google Ads and the unwelcome attention we get from companies like NewsGuard, which rank news publishing sites according to how ‘safe’ they are for companies to advertise on, the Daily Sceptic struggles to attract any advertising. (UnHerd has a similar problem, as reported by Freddie Sayers in today’s Times.) This is a prime example of the censorship-industrial complex at work, as described by Lee Fang in a recent article in the New York Post. In that article, Fang documented my unsuccessful attempt to get NewsGuard to upgrade its ranking of the Daily Sceptic last year in the hope of attracting some advertising:
NewsGuard’s core business is a misinformation metre, in which websites are rated on a scale of 0 to 100 on a variety of factors, including headline choice and whether a site publishes “false or egregiously misleading content”.
Such an endeavour might appear as an objective public service, but the devil is in the details.
Editors who have engaged with NewsGuard have found that the company has made bizarre demands that unfairly tarnish an entire site as untrustworthy for straying from the official narrative.
The Daily Sceptic, a libertarian-leaning British site, is one such example. In a series of emails over the last two years, editor Toby Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve the Daily Sceptic’s 74.5 rating.
NewsGuard took issue with the website’s criticism of lockdowns – it called them “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful” – and cited academic literature on the topic.
Young went so far as to add postscripts to his articles, relaying the issues raised by the fact-checkers and providing additional information.
For his good-faith interactions, Young was rewarded with a downgrade. NewsGuard updated his rating to 37.5 on its scale.
NewsGuard wanted nothing other than a retraction of the articles it objected to, despite the fact that further research has documented the harmful effects of lockdowns.
We’ve suffered from similar efforts to shadowban our content on social media. Facebook frequently restricts the content we post, claiming, falsely, that it is “false or misleading” and redirecting readers to ‘fact-checking’ sites that in reality are fountains of Covid and climate-related misinformation, often funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or some other front for billionaire activists.
While legacy media have been haemorrhaging eyeballs due to a collapse in trust, the Daily Sceptic is now averaging 1.5 million page views per month – higher than the New Statesman, Novara Media and the Morning Star combined. Given that it’s produced on a shoestring from my garden shed, that’s pretty remarkable and shows just how much appetite there is for journalism that seeks to publish the truth about issues like climate change, rather than just regurgitate regime propaganda.
So, if you value what we do, please think about making a donation. We’re only able to continue producing such high-quality journalism because Will Jones, Richard Eldred, Chris Morrison, Ian Rons, Noah Carl, J. Sorel, Robert Kogon, Ben Pile and Steven Tucker – all of whom are paid to either work on the site or produce regular content – devote so much time to it. And we can’t continue doing that without the generous support of our readers. Remember, you only have to donate £5 a month to be able to comment (or £50 to comment for a year). A big thank you to all those people who’ve donated recently, particularly those who’ve set up recurring monthly donations – and a thank you to those people who regularly post below the line. It’s hugely appreciated.
We don’t just want to stand still, but move the site forward, increasing the range and depth of our offering, reaching new readers and audiences. Our objective is for the Daily Sceptic to establish itself as the main source of sceptical analysis of the key social and economic policies of the day, particularly those which claim to be based on ‘the science’, such as Net Zero. We want to increase the space devoted to climate contrarianism, with a view to becoming the U.K.’s number one source of sceptical climate coverage. With the near-term prospect of the U.K. electing a Labour Government with an even more authoritarian disposition than the current Conservative administration, the tide of poorly thought through, draconian legislation – as well as the capture of Britain’s leading companies and organisations by ‘woke’ ideologues – looks likely to rise. We therefore want to grow our team to help cement our position at the forefront of the anti-authoritarian alt-media.
We’ve already started to make this happen, with the addition of veteran climate journalist Ben Pile to the Daily Sceptic stable. Our next step is to launch the Weekly Round-Up – a new weekly, one-hour podcast, both audio and video, featuring Toby Young, Will Jones, Chris Morrison and other regular contributors, all anchored by a brand new host discussing the top stories of the week. In addition, we want to introduce some premium content for paying subscribers, while making sure 95% of our content is still available for free, and set up a community forum on Discord, where those paying £5 a month or more can talk to us and each other. To achieve all this, we need to expand our team a little further.
We’re hiring!
We’re currently looking for a new Associate Editor to take the lead in running and hosting the new Weekly Round-Up podcast, as well as writing for the site and moderating the new Discord community. It’s a part-time role, with one to two days on the podcast and one to two days on writing and other duties each week. Here are the details:
Job Description
- Writing two or three pieces a week
- Preparing for and hosting the Weekly Round-Up, a new Daily Sceptic podcast (audio and video), interviewing regular guests and contributors
- Curating and moderating a new Discord forum for premium subscribers
Skills and qualifications:
- Some journalistic experience
- Good conversationalist
- Particular interest in our main subject areas, e.g. climate alarmism, radical progressive ideology and liberal authoritarianism in general
- Master of the English language, e.g. can write and speak well
- Scientifically literate (nice to have, not essential)
- Familiar with WordPress and Discord (not essential for a quick learner)
Time Commitment:
- 0.5 FTE
- Could go to full time
Pay
- £35,000 – £37,000 (pro rated) plus pension contribution
Reporting to:
- The Editor-in-Chief
If you’re interested in applying or finding out more, please email us here using the subject line “Associate Editor”.
And do please forward this post to anyone you think might be interested. And if you enjoy reading the Daily Sceptic and would like to see us reach an even bigger audience, please donate here.
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