How to fix the New Statesman

In which I probably burn some bridges.

Hello everyone! I’m afraid I’ve been struck down by a rather annoying cold this week, and my brain just isn’t functioning at full capacity, so I’m afraid the brand new essay I had planned for this week will instead land next week – but I promise you it will be a fun one!

In the meantime, I thought I’d crack open one of my most notorious pieces from the archives as it is newly relevant again – my piece on how to fix the beleaguered New Statesman. Given the magazine is currently searching for a new editor (and presumably a slightly new direction), and is still making… questionable… choices, like this week interviewing Steve Bannon, I thought you might like to read my take on how to turn things around. (This was originally published in December 2023.)

And if you’re new here, and enjoy nerdy politics, policy, tech and media chat, you’ll like my newsletter. So be sure to subscribe for free to get more in your inbox!

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Twitter’s most underrated function is that it is a tool for social mobility.

After graduating into the financial crisis, I moved to London and I didn’t know anyone. My parents are not super wealthy, I went to a normal comprehensive school in the Midlands – and then to a post-1994 university. So when it came to getting a job and building a professional network, I was essentially starting from scratch.

But the one asset I did have was that I was a Twitter early adopter. Through the platform I discovered an entire professional world that would historically have been closed off to me, and as I followed journalists, politicos and other high-flyers, I was able to glimpse into their world, learn the industry gossip, identify the behind-the-scenes power-players and master the terms of art. Scrolling my timeline was like having a permanent spot at the water-cooler of London’s political and media elite.

Fast-forward through 17 years or so of intense tweeting and I’ve successfully carved out a freelance career as a professional writer and opinion-haver. I have a professional network and connections with people I’d never have had access to otherwise¹. And I’ve even memed my way into meetings with important politicians.

So Twitter, in a very tangible way, has changed my life for the better.

However, it has also given me another super-power, which is more of a mixed blessing: I’ve become a real connoisseur of low-key Twitter beefs.

For example, one classic of the genre is the tension between former academic co-authors Rob Ford and Matthew Goodwin. After working together on Revolt on the Right, the key text in understanding the rise of UKIP, today they are more likely to be found subtweeting each other with barely concealed contempt².

However, their beef is a bit too mainstream now, and I’m a hipster. That’s why my current favourite sparring partners to watch are Robert Colvile, the YIMBY director of the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies, and Tom Copley, the Labour Deputy Mayor of London with the housing portfolio. Each time new building data is released, you can pretty much guarantee the pair will be enjoyably raging at each others’ takes³.

This is like KSI vs Logan Paul for subscribers of Politico Playbook.

And just in case you’re wondering, my favourite trans-Atlantic beef is between my close friend Nate Silver and the Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr, who used to work for Silver at FiveThirtyEight. Though they keep their subtweets broadly civil, there’s clearly some drama beneath the surface along roughly classical-liberal-versus-woke lines.

Anyway, I mention this because a couple of weeks ago, a significant drama-bomb was dropped by one of my favourite writers, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times. After his former employer, the New Statesman (NS), announced a round of redundancies he tweeted a stinging criticism of the direction of the publication, and accused its bosses of a “colossal failure of leadership”.

Ouch.

He has a point though. It is definitely weird that the NS, which is often described as the “Labour Bible” is struggling given that the Labour Party is in the ascendence.

I don’t have any inside information on exactly what has led to the redundancies⁴ but what seems to have gone wrong is that the 'international expansion’ strategy, which began 2021 with a bunch of expensive-sounding new hires, appears to have stalled.

I’m guessing by the upmarket rebrand that the management basically said “Try and be more like The Atlantic” – which has been a digital success story in the United States. But then it turned out that scaling a primarily British publication, with a British-sized budget, that only has brand value in Britain, has proven more difficult than hoped⁵.

As I say, this is just wild speculation – but that’s an explanation that would explain the redundancies.

So if this is the case, perhaps then it is time to pivot again to another strategy. The NS needs another new direction if it wants to be successful. And the good news is that I think I’ve figured out what that direction should be.

So read on as I dive in and explain how to fix the New Statesman – and risk burning a few bridges along the way.

Go on, subscribe to get my takes!

Fix the mission

I’ve previously written about the importance of having a ‘mission’ to focus an organisation. You need to know what your ‘North Star’ is, as that helps inform the strategic decisions you make.

So what’s apparent with the NS is that the implied mission of “Become an international brand in the left-of-centre content space” has failed – so the first thing management should do is figure out something new.

In my view, it’s pretty obvious what it should be – and it is something that Stephen nods to in his tweet above. The NS should play to its historic brand strength, and not widen, but narrow the scope. It should reestablish itself as the de-facto ‘house’ journal of the Labour Party, and it should double-down on becoming the key media outlet in the party.

In other words, the New Statesman should be the place where the Labour Party goes to find new ideas, debate its strategy, and where everyone needs to go to learn about what is really going on inside the party.

This is a place where the NS already has strength.

The reason I used to read Stephen’s newsletter every morning when he was at the NS was because he is clearly incredibly plugged-in to the key people in the party, and he is great at parsing through all of Labour’s internal machinations to explain why given figures and factions are behaving the way they are.

Obviously he’s at the FT now – but the objective of NS management should be to build out a roster of reporters who can similarly walk this beat. If something important is happening inside the Labour Party, it should be the NS where people hear about it.

Broader coverage should feed this goal too. The NS already does some great reporting that illustrates the political context the Labour Party faces, and the political and policy choices it has to make. Look at the archives of Anoosh Chakelian, the Britain Editor, for example. Virtually all of her reporting is meaty and directly relevant to the questions Labour needs to be discussing.

(I even think there could be a strong case for going full ‘mask-off’ on support for Labour – and I’ve explained why in an incredibly long footnote.⁶)

There is, however, a more brutal side to refocusing the mission, and that’s choosing what not to do. So though it pains me to say it, the NS should not prioritise foreign coverage.

I’m guessing this will be the first thing to go in any case – I’d be very shocked if it wasn’t the part of the business that didn’t have some of the highest costs relative to the traffic or subscriptions it generates.

Because though it is no-doubt good for the brand to have long reads on the Serbian elections or whatever, the reality is that the sort of audience that wants that content can get it elsewhere, such as from The Economist, which has successfully scaled and built an international audience, with budgets and people-power to match. The NS simply will never match the bigger players in terms of depth or reach on international coverage.

So I realise I’m being brutal, but I think the pain would be worth it. With a newly focused mission, the NS can double-down on its core strengths as the Labour Bible, and it can build a product that has a smaller audience than the one imagined by its erstwhile global ambitions – but by more narrowly focusing on Labour, it will be an audience of readers who really care what the NS has to say.

Fix the content

This will no doubt be the squishiest section of my recommendations, but I think it is important. After the mission are the actual words that are written. And the NS needs to work harder to ensure the content serves its business objectives.

My first suggestion here is surely the most awkward one to make: The New Statesman needs to be less damn posh.

There’s a game I secretly play whenever I see a “personal news” tweet. When someone announces that they’re joining the NS, I’ll look up their education background – it’s usually not that hard to find – and see how much the fees are at the school they attended.

Why? Because it seems incredibly rare to find anyone on the editorial staff who went to a normal school⁷, like 93% of the rest of us did. And then for bonus points I’ll look up their university and most of the time discover that – surprise! – they went to Oxbridge.

I only partially write this bitter, classist screed as an embarrassing display of professional jealousy. And this isn’t to begrudge the specific, privately educated individuals who do work at the NS. They no doubt worked hard to get where they are, and they do produce good work. That’s why I read NS stories regularly!

But it does seem a bit weird to me that Britain’s leading left-of-centre magazine is massively disproportionately staffed by the ultra-privileged, even if the problem isn’t unique to the NS, and is much the same across the rest of the commentariat⁸.

And more substantially, I wonder if this also blinds the staff and management to the opportunity presented by aiming for a slightly broader audience.

To use myself as an example – and I realise that I may not be particularly representative – a lot of what the NS publishes, particularly in its arts and books coverage, as well as the long and torturous essays that always conclude that the answer is capitalism is bad, just leave me completely cold.

And given that I’m Masters Degree educated and the sort of person who likes reading long essays about politics, if I’m not interested, what does that say about the size of the potential audience for this sort of content?

So it strikes me that there’s a potentially much larger audience for NS content if it would just aim to be a touch more accessible.

Here, I visualised it on a very scientific chart:

In fact, the potential market opportunity of going ever-so-slightly-lower-brow can be seen from miles away⁹. Look at the huge success of Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, The News Agents, or even YouTubers like Johnny Harris and Wendover Productions. Similarly, the New European, which has slightly more tabloid sensibilities, has nearly caught up to the NS in terms of circulation, despite the NS’s century long head start.

Sure, some of those successes will be down to the format – video and audio is compelling and both formats are booming. But some of the success will be because they tackle pretty clever subjects, without coming across as almost unbearably smug¹⁰.

In any case, this opportunity shouldn’t be that much of a revelation. There are, after all, many more ‘Waterstones Dads’ than there are ‘New Statesman Men’.

However, snooty essays about capitalism written by people who probably boast that they don’t own a TV isn’t the only problem. I think there’s also another tone issue to deal with: The cranks.

If I were in charge I’d stop publishing weird essays that basically accept some of Russia’s framing of the war in Ukraine. Not because it isn’t important to consider alternative perspectives, however wrong or maddening they might be… but because of the collateral brand damage.

I think the ideological sweet-spot for the NS from a brand perspective would be “a broad tent within the boundaries of the Labour Party”, rather than “a broad tent across the left”. That way, advertisers won’t get nervous, people with boring, mainstream opinions about foreign policy will be less likely to reflexively unsubscribe¹¹ – and the NS will maintain its credibility with a broader audience. The more out-there stuff can be left to the Substackers¹².

And one last thing on content: Something I suspect is just my own prejudices, but would it kill the NS to be a little more optimistic?

Amazingly, I’m not just talking about miserable old John Gray, who every few months is inexplicably given another opportunity by the magazine to re-publish basically the same opinion piece that always concludes that liberalism is bad and progress isn’t possible¹³. The problem goes much broader.

Looking at my own niche interest of tech, headlines on the homepage at the time of writing include pieces titled “Elon Musk has more ego than sense,”¹⁴ “Bill Gates is bad for humanity,” and “The techno-optimist fallacy”, which argues the book it is reviewing does not go far enough in its critique of capitalism.

I accept that not everyone is as naively tech-optimistic as I am, and I agree that billionaires are bad and it would be nice to redistribute their wealth more widely. But surely there is also room for pieces like the ones Hannah Ritchie and Zion Lights write independently, which argue that we can actually solve problems?

Given that we’re en route to a Labour majority, perhaps it’d be nice to give readers a sense of hope, and not just remind them that being on the left means that you have to be joyless and miserable?

But maybe that’s just me.

Fix the business model

Anyway, my subjective carping aside, let’s end by focusing on what really matters: The business model. Here I think the NS management should go back to first principles.

A print magazine might have made sense for delivering content a century ago. It might also make sense today, if the intention is to create a premium-feeling product along the lines of The Atlantic or The Economist – both of which are experiencing a boom in circulation¹⁵.

But virtually every other type of print product today is either surviving only as a legacy institution that serves a stagnant and mature audience, or is in decline. Print circulation of national newspapers has got so bad that figures are no longer routinely published by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, because the numbers are too embarrassing. Instead, new audiences can be found, of course, online.

Given this, the challenge for virtually all publishers is working out how long to keep print products going, before pulling the plug – the dilemma being that in many cases, digital revenues, even when traffic volumes exceed those of print, do not match the income generated from physical media.

As the gamble to elevate the NS to that premium-level seems to have failed, I think it could be worth rolling the dice and doing something more radical: Ditching not just the print magazine, but the website as the primary organising product too – and going all-in on the newsletter-model, or even with Substack specifically.

I think the logic is pretty compelling. What’s made Substack such a success is that it has married together blogging, distribution and payments – making it possible for writers to monetise a loyal audience, while achieving impressive reach.

This is essentially what the NS needs. And if you imagine the NS with its new laser focus on covering the Labour discourse, newsletter distribution is clearly a format that works for news/gossip (as evidenced by Politico’s successful Playbook email, that is read by virtually everyone in Westminster), and for long form reporting and analysis (as demonstrated by, say, the wildly successful Comment is Freed and Persuasion).

The trade-off is that it would presumably mean giving up, or reducing advertising as a source of income – but the the benefit would be a highly engaged audience who, if the content is suitably compelling, can and will pay for it. And it has a ready-made route for putting it directly in their faces.

Interestingly, the NS has already dipped its toe into this model – importing its email database to the ‘Saturday Read’ Substack to generate some huge engagement numbers¹⁶.

And I think this is a sign that whether it happens soon or in a few years, this is the inevitable future of the NS as a relatively niche political publication. Because why publish an article on a website that may be read by a few thousand people, when you can actively push content out to many more, with a paywall slapped right on top of it? Like Netflix and TV, Substack has created not just a new model for niche written content – but perhaps a better one too.

The New New Statesman

So that, in a nutshell, is my pitch. Admit defeat on global ambitions, laser focus in on what the NS does best, frame the content more accessibly, and hook it up to a distribution mechanism to reach the audience the NS wants to serve. Easy, right?

Perhaps not so much. The grim reality is that in a world that has been upended by digital, it is hard for any legacy brand to succeed. But it is possible – you can see examples of impressive turnarounds from the New York Times, to Microsoft, to Disney, which have successfully made a big strategic pivot – but to do so, it has meant needing to make difficult strategic choices and slaying some sacred cows along the way.

Despite my grumbling above, I really do want The New Statesman to continue to exist and to succeed. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading it, and have even had the privilege of writing for it a few times¹⁷.

So I just hope the management will figure it out. And that by writing this, I hope I haven’t inadvertently started my own massive Twitter beef with basically the entire New Statesman team.

Enjoyed reading this? Then subscribe (for free!) to get more of my takes direct to your inbox!

You may also enjoy my pieces on how to fix The Observer, how to fix Local Journalism, and how, er, Owen Jones should fix his career.

1. As if to prove how I’ve built a professional network/what an unbearable arsehole I am, something I find myself doing in bookshops is looking at the non-fiction new releases section and seeing how many books are written by people who follow me on Twitter. Usually there are at least a few.

2. Goodwin has been fully consumed by his audience, and believes Britain is oppressed by a hazily defined ‘New Elite’ that refuses to invite him to dinner, and Ford… doesn’t.

3. I’m not really smart enough to tell you who is right.

4. As above I’m clearly interested in insider media gossip so anyone who knows what is actually going on is more than welcome to send me takes from the inside.

5. The Spectator has been simultaneously trying something similar on the right, with the launch of a US edition of its print magazine and more US-focused columnists. I’ve no idea how well it is doing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is faring slightly better because there’s presumably more billionaire investor money and arguably more vacant intellectual/ideological space on the US right. It’s very striking that at the time of writing, the homepage of Spectator USA doesn’t use the word “Trump” once. [2025 update: This is no longer the case, unsurprisingly.]

6. Though it is obviously a left-of-centre magazine, and has a long association with the party, there has always been the illusion of journalistic distance.

In principle, this is good for intellectual hygiene, but I wonder if the NS would be more effective if it were to position itself as something like Crooked Media in the United States.

Crooked was founded in 2017 by three former Obama staffers, and it currently makes a mixture of general interest and political content (primarily podcasts). Not a million miles away from the NS. But what makes it notable is that it is explicitly pro-Democrat in its orientation, with the company helping to train activists, and raise money for candidates.

And by all accounts, it has been wildly successful at building a hyper-engaged audience. Smartly, the company maintains a fairly broad church within the party (so isn’t always obsequious to the Biden White House), but clearly positioning itself as an unabashed supporter of the Democrats has been effective at building affinity for the company, and as a result, the company has a passionate and loyal audience with a connection that goes beyond the traditional relationship consumers have with media companies.

So you can imagine the NS doing something similar with Labour over here. Instead of being simply another magazine with some stuff in it, it could be a rallying point for Labour activists, where they can go to find out party news, or to complain about their factional rivals, and yet still find information about how to join phone-banks, or advice on how to frame messaging when knocking on doors. The NS could be a major tool for equipping Labour’s foot-soldiers with the intellectual tools they need to win.

But I admit that this might be a step too far for the NS.

7. Before you shout, I’m sure there are a few who went to comprehensives, and maybe a couple who got a scholarship to posh school. But still – wildly out of whack with the rest of society.

8. Amusingly with my friend Blakeley Nixon, we actually once wrote a piece for the, er, New Statesman highlighting the elite education backgrounds of people who have appeared on Question Time, as a given snapshot of ‘the establishment’.

9. I sometimes think back to an aborted experiment with the NS podcast several years ago, when after 20 minutes of enjoyable and well informed politics chat with Stephen Bush and Helen Lewis, they’d cut to an excruciating arts segment, featuring the two poshest people you’ve ever heard discussing which plays they’ve seen lately. Needless to say I got pretty good at the hammering the “skip 15 seconds” button the right amount of times.

10. Obviously I’m much less successful than the people mentioned there, but I’d also perhaps include my own Substack in this group, from a tone-perspective. As I’ve successfully built a small but smart and influential audience with long form writing, I think in part by writing about fairly weighty subjects, but approaching them with a relatively light touch.

11. I actually unsubscribed from the NS a few years ago but brilliantly, my special subscribers-only ad-free podcast feed continues to work to this day. Nobody tell them.

12. Maybe this would be bad for the wider world. Imagine if I’d applied this same logic to the Iraq war. But aside from the fact that I suspect “supporting Ukraine is good” will prove a more historically enduring opinion than “invading Iraq is good”, remember that we’re talking about what best serves the NS as an outlet here – and that’s the incentive we’re aligning this strategy around.

13. Are there really people out there who are picking up the magazine from the racks in WH Smiths thinking “Ooh, John Gray!”?

14. 2025 footnote: Yes, I know.

15. Another sign of just how well The Economist is doing is that not only is it selling a tonne of copies, but it is currently a staggering eight fucking quid. And usually, well worth it too.

16. The NS weirdly has a similar dilemma here to the second-tier streamers like Paramount Plus. In essence, the question is do they want to try and be a big platform, with its own infrastructure, owning the entire customer relationship? Or is it easier to become a ‘channel’ inside a bigger player like Amazon Prime Video, with interactions mediated by a bigger platform, but with a quicker funnel to customers and payments?

17. I’m guessing this won’t happen again now.