Can James Harding’s Tortoise be more than a rich person’s club?

When James Harding left the BBC as head of news in October 2017, it was to start a mysterious new venture. In times past this would have been unthinkable. Heading the BBC newsroom means you have at your disposal one of the great reporting institutions of the modern age – more than 2,000 journalists across the globe.

Harding is affable and well liked, which is not often the case for the news leadership classes. And among the small circle of those who traded gossip on possible candidates for the next director general, his name was always on the list. But the media, and running the world’s most powerful news organisation, is not what it once was. Harding’s exit announcement a year ago came at a time when the world arguably needed journalism to be at its majestic best, but the conditions for delivering it were at their worst.

The BBC had a particularly rocky time during the 2016 Brexit campaign and the aftermath of the leave vote. Although nobody blamed Harding for what are systemic failings, the criticism of BBC news has been stinging. My colleague Nick Cohen of the Observer wrote an excoriating essay for the New York Review of Books, entitled How the BBC lost the plot on Brexit, in which he noted: “The BBC’s reporting of the scandals around the Brexit referendum is not biased or unbalanced: it barely exists. It is as though the US networks had decided the Mueller investigation was no concern of theirs.”

In his choice of new venture, Harding, who was previously an editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, perhaps gives away the extent to which the BBC experience was overwhelming for him. He has chosen to move from breaking hundreds of stories a day across dozens of outlets, Twitter feeds and apps to opening a membership boutique for slow journalism.

Tortoise has now crept fully out of hibernation. It is run with his co-founders Matthew Barzun, the former US ambassador in London, and Katie Vanneck-Smith, who left her post as president of Dow Jones to climb on board the Tortoise train. Barzun is well connected and wealthy, the grandson of the historian and intellectual Jacques Barzun, and his wife is part of the Jack Daniel’s whiskey dynasty.

Backing comes from a number of like-minded wealthy people: the banker Bernie Mensah and his wife, Genevieve, and the tech investor Saul Klein, who was at St Paul’s school, London, at the same time as Harding in the 1980s. A further pair of backers remain anonymous.

A Kickstarter campaign for Tortoise membership rocketed past £300,000, offering those who buy the highest tier for £8,000 their own named chair in the news conference. Vanneck-Smith said a large number of younger contributors had given small amounts on Kickstarter, and that the intent of the startup was to be redistributive – using the expensive membership tiers and other funding to broaden access.

The venture has three years of funding in place and has hired high-profile journalists such as Chris Cook from Newsnight and the Guardian’s Merope Mills. The model draws from ideas tried with varying degrees of success by other news organisations. The “open news” championed by Tortoise was pioneered at the Guardian by Alan Rusbridger in the 2000s. The partnership funding model is taken from Axios, the US startup founded by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei who also created Politico. The idea of longer, more thoughtful takes and ignoring breaking news comes from any number of playbooks for digital startups, but probably owes most to Vox and Quartz.

Harding’s own description of the venture as being like a cross between TED and the Economist might be lacking in appeal unless you enjoy being lectured to by the terminally earnest. But live events are critical to the model’s success. “We will have to take Tortoise out,” says Vanneck-Smith, perhaps regretting Harding’s choice of animal.

The redistributive model of news funding is gathering pace in the US as the free market version remains under pressure. There is an acceptance that billionaires might be the answer after all. Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple founder Steve Jobs, has supported journalism through philanthropy and the purchase of the Atlantic; Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce, recently bought Time magazine; Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post with his Amazon billions; and one of the most active philanthropists at the moment is Craigslist’s founder, Craig Newmark (full disclosure: the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism School, for whom I work, receive funding from Newmark’s foundation).

Tortoise is unhurried in its quest for capital. The sustainability closet, or whatever passes for a war chest these days, must have – by my calculations – a minimum of £30m in it to be able to fund its ambitions for three years. Like its animal emblem, there is nothing about the startup to dislike, particularly if the thought of ill-funded newsrooms overwhelmed by news they can never hope to report upsets you. There will be a long queue of editors and writers wanting to join. But it feels like an escape from the structural problems of journalism rather than a solution.

Journalism is in constant need of reinvention and the energy people are able to plough into something they have founded themselves is a significant advantage. The large and bureaucratic institutions they might otherwise inhabit don’t necessarily inspire the same kind of verve. But journalism does need strong institutions and it needs them more urgently at the bottom of the fiscal heap than the top. Hopefully, Tortoise will encourage a rush of 1% wealth into more deprived areas of coverage, too.

No doubt Tortoise will address some of the burning questions that are unanswered about Brexit, income inequality, racism, the health service, climate change, the march of authoritarianism, the inexorable rise of misogyny, the challenges of artificial intelligence and the collapse of democratic institutions. If it can manage all of this from its members’ club for contemplative journalism, it will indeed deserve a nice lie-down in a cardboard box with some lettuce.