The Canary (website)
The Canary[Sputnik (television programme)|] is a left-wing news website based in the United Kingdom. Its editor-in-chief is Kerry-Anne Mendoza. While focusing on UK political affairs, it also has a "Global" section, a satire section, and "Science", "Environment", and "Health" sections. Founded in 2015, the website increased in popularity after the 2017 United Kingdom general election.
History
The Canary was created in October 2015 with five founding members in an attempt to "diversify the media", according to editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza. The website was funded by advertising and monthly contributions from around 1,500 supporters in August 2016.A major factor motivating The Canary founders, Mendoza said, was scepticism of the mainstream media, a scepticism shared by Jeremy Corbyn, the then leader of the Labour Party. In his first address as Labour leader, he attacked pundits for not understanding the discontent among many ordinary British voters, and talked about the "power of social media".
Following the 2017 United Kingdom general election, the BBC reported that "Sites such as The Canary, The Skwawkbox, and Another Angry Voice are making a huge impact and earning a massive following."
In August 2019, The Canary announced on Twitter that the comedian Alexei Sayle would be writing a regular column. He wrote two columns, in August and September that year.
Political standpoint
Describing her website to Journalism.co.uk, Canary editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza said that:For us, this is ultimately about democracy. Informed consent in the public is the bedrock of democracy, and if that informed consent isn't there because people aren't aware of the kind of information that they need to be, they won't be equipped to make the decent democratic decisions that they need to, say, for example, on climate change, the justice system, or whether austerity is a positive economic policy.
The Canary is generally supportive of Corbyn, but has also supported Natalie Bennett and the Greens' "radical alternative" to the "Tory-lite" policies of "the neoliberal Labour Party" asserting "The Green Party's rise to viability preceded the election of Jeremy Corbyn" and the emergence of Momentum.
Mendoza claims that it was "a complete coincidence" that the website was created shortly after Corbyn's leadership victory. "We don't have any affiliations with political parties, we don't have any affiliations with political organisations, and we're not actually ostensibly left-wing", she added, calling the site's editorial stance "a counterpoint to conservative media" and "broadly liberal". Mendoza also stated that The Canary was "biased in favour of social justice, equal rights – those are non-negotiable things. We’re in this as an issue-driven organisation", and stated: "Every press organisation has an editorial stance and we’re certainly no different."
Regulation and accuracy
In August 2017, The Canary joined the voluntary state-approved press regulator IMPRESS. IMPRESS upheld two of the 58 complaints they received during 2017/18 about The Canary's news reporting.In April 2019, The Canary was given an overall pass rating and a pass on eight out of nine factors by NewsGuard, an organisation which evaluates news outlets for trustworthiness.
A 2018 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism described The Canary as "a left-wing partisan site" and an example of "alternative and partisan brands" which have "a political or ideological agenda and their user base tends to passionately share these views". Its level of trust amongst those surveyed was found to be one of the lowest for UK news sites, with trust rating of 4.69 where 10 is fully trusted, although its trust level among its own users was at 6.65.
Mendoza has said: "We are human beings and we make mistakes. We clean up the mess and make sure it's clear to our readership". In a video posted on Twitter in November 2018, The Canary stated that "in the last 3 years, we've published more than 9,000 unique articles" and that "the number of significant mistakes can be counted on one hand". Similarly, The Canary said that as of March 2019 it had produced 10,000 articles since its creation and two of these articles required deletion after editorial review, representing 0.02% of their content.
Business model
In April 2016, Mendoza said in Free & Fearless that:we are attracting an audience of 3.5 million unique users per month. On top of this: every two hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – someone becomes a paid subscriber of The Canary... Our growing traffic is attracting advertisers who are now offering us a floor RPM of £3 and a ceiling of £9."
According to The Canary's FAQ, around half of the website's revenue is raised from online advertising, and the other half from reader subscriptions.
The website explains its business model: "Each writer and section editor is paid in two ways. Firstly, each and every article receives a flat-rate equal payment from our monthly income from supporters. So with each new supporter, the pay per article goes up for everyone every month. Secondly, each article receives a top-up payment based directly on the percentage of web traffic, and therefore advertising income, that articles generate during a given calendar month." This pay-per-click model has been criticised for promoting clickbait as writers are only paid for their work if it becomes viral. Mendoza disputes this, claiming that the payment structure means that people who generate the revenues get a fair share.
During 2016–18, the website had an editorial team of around 30, although only five of The Canary staff earn enough money to work full-time. It had an annual turnover of £250,000 in 2016.
In early 2019, Stop Funding Fake News, which described The Canary as promoting conspiracy theories, defending antisemitism, and publishing fake news, was launched to pressure advertisers not to allow their ads to run on left-wing websites such as The Canary and Evolve Politics and the right-wing websites Westmonster, since closed, and Canadian site The Rebel Media. The anonymous campaign was supported by Rachel Riley, who campaigns against the leadership's handling of allegations of antisemitism within the Labour Party, Jewish News and Nick Cohen. The campaign persuaded Macmillan Cancer Support to suspend advertising on the website while it reviewed online ad placement. In response to criticisms from the campaign, a co-founder of The Canary, Nancy Mendoza, who is Jewish, said that neither she nor the site was antisemitic but that it had taken a position of solidarity with the Palestinian people. In August 2019, The Canary emailed users to announce that it would rely more on its inhouse team and less on freelance contributors, due to a reduced income. After the email was shared online, Mendoza said on Twitter that, by the middle of this August, the website would “leave the gig economy”. The Canary said this was due to Facebook and Google changing their algorithms, which reduced the site's traffic and therefore advertising income, and to the campaign to persuade advertisers to blacklist the site: it said it was "susceptible to pressure from political Zionists, and our advertising revenue is under fire". The Canary mounted a recruitment drive for one thousand additional subscribers, which it reported it had achieved by early August, saying this had secured its immediate future. Then Labour Party MP Chris Williamson described the SFFN's campaign against The Canary as "sinister". In March 2020, advertising for Tom Stoppard' play Leopoldstadt about the legacy of the Holocaust were removed from The Canary in response to its concerns about antisemitism.
Views
, General Secretary of Unite the Union has said to the Morning Star in 2017:Max Keiser, in his programme for the RT channel, has said that the site "really digs into some of the salient points that need to be made about austerity", saying in an interview with Kerry-Anne Mendoza that he has "been following this site for a while now". Former Respect MP George Galloway also praised the website on his show
Sputnik, also for RT.
Jasper Jackson in the New Statesman labelled sites like The Canary as "hyper-partisan", owing to its mainly pro-Corbyn content. Carl Miller of Demos has said that, while the "digital world" has been "democratizing", he believes that sites such as The Canary, which reflect a single worldview, cut down on dissenting information and are likely to make people "even angrier, more outraged, more certain that that people we disagree with are evil... which isn't good for reasoned, civil debate". Owen Jones told PR Week in January 2017 that the website "promotes conspiracy theories and a lot of things that just aren't right. I worry about the Canary-isation of the left, where it ends up in a bizarre sub-culture that anyone who doesn't agree is seen as part of a conspiracy. But then you do get those blogs on left and right."
Notable articles
The Canary has published a number of stories which have been notable enough to be picked up by mainstream media outlets.Electoral fraud investigations
Following the 2015 general election, The Canary "dug into assorted expense claims and activities in seats", according to Michael White in The Guardian, after a whistleblower contacted the website to allege illegal telephone push polling by the Conservatives.Portland Communications story
In June 2016, a Canary article saying that the parliamentary revolt against Corbyn "appears to have been orchestrated" by Portland Communications went viral and was repeated by Len McCluskey on Andrew Marr's Sunday morning BBC programme. The article listed links between partners and employees of the PR firm, where Alistair Campbell is a senior advisor, and members of the centre-left Fabian Society and other politicians on the right of the Labour Party, without providing evidence that the firm had organised the revolt.Laura Kuenssberg
The Canary has been critical of Laura Kuenssberg's coverage of Jeremy Corbyn, and BBC News politics coverage more generally: according to one commentator, Kuenssberg "has displayed a level of bias against Labour in recent months, and certainly her attacks on Corbyn's leadership have been verging on hysterical". The website promoted a petition calling for her resignation, hosted by 38 Degrees. 38 Degrees later took the petition down, with the agreement of the originator, saying that the petition "had become a focal point for sexist and hateful abuse made towards Laura Kuenssberg on Twitter". The Canary reported Craig Murray's view that the petition was probably taken down due to "Establishment pressure" while Ian Middleton in The Huffington Post wrote that: "if one looks at the list of comments published... it's difficult to find anything remotely aggressive or sexist", and the accusations of abuse "may have been part of an orchestrated campaign on behalf of those looking to discredit the petition itself".In the 14 months between the withdrawal of the petition in May 2016 and 20 July 2017, according to Jasper Jackson of the New Statesman, The Canary ran "at least 17 articles criticising Kuenssberg. In September 2017, The Canary published an inaccurate headline that " listed as a speaker at the Tory Party conference". The Canary later modified its headline and added a statement released by the BBC in response, stating that she would not be speaking. However, IMPRESS, the press regulator, adjudicated in December 2017 that the website had broken its code by publishing an inaccurate headline, not making sufficient efforts to check the facts, and failing to correct the inaccuracy with due prominence.
Readership
During July 2016, The Canary achieved over 7.5 million page views, ranking 97th in readership among British media organisations, slightly higher than The Spectator and The Economist. The site's publishers, Canary Media, rose 47 spots from 126th in June to 79th in July among the top UK publishers. By February 2017 the site had fallen out of the top 100 with under 6 million views. The majority of its site traffic comes from Facebook.A 2018 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found The Canary to be used by 2% of the UK news audience, compared with The Times website on 5% or The Guardian on 15%. Its readers were more left-wing than readers of all but one other publication in the survey.