Welcome to ‘Byline Times Substack’

Byline Supplement is evolving. Byline Times Editor-in-Chief, Hardeep Matharu explains how and why

When Byline Supplement launched in November 2022, Byline Times became the first major UK publication to have a real presence on Substack.

More than three years on, we have attracted 31,000 subscribers to our emails and 50,000 followers across email and the Substack app, with our posts reaching an average of half a million people a month.

Today, as we relaunch as Byline Times Substack, seems a good time to set out our journey so far.

Byline Times was founded in 2019 by Peter Jukes and Stephen Colegrave as an independent, reader-funded, investigative national news site and monthly print magazine to cover ‘what the papers don’t say’.

Much of Peter’s work in journalism up to that point excavated the distortions to politics and people’s lives at the hands of the Murdoch press in Britain.

From the (still unsolved) murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan in 1987 to the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011, Byline Times was crafted from a core belief that, for reasons structural, cultural, and political, the way in which the established press in Britain can affect our democracy and society is one of the biggest stories and scandals of our time.

Sadly, this prospect is now becoming a lived reality across the Atlantic.

Alongside the dominance of private ownership and personal ideology – as opposed to the public interest – the advent of digital news, and now social media, has made ‘alternative facts’ up for grabs; clickbait and memes ubiquitous; real investigations few and far between; context lacking; and deeper analysis informed by independent thinking too often absent.

Byline Times, then, was founded with a mission: to scrutinise and help make accountable the role of the press itself in how our democracy and society is distorted; and to bring to light the deeper causes of our seemingly inexplicable political and social crises.

To do this, we needed to be independent – in terms of our funding, as well as by being ‘outside the system’. No cosy political-media suppers in Westminster for us.

As a small start-up in those early days, we appreciated social media’s double-edged sword. While we reported on the dangers of such platforms, much of our early community of readers and subscribers was created through Twitter.

Hardeep speaking in February in London at the Royal Society of Arts in a discussion about the future of the BBC. Photo: RSA

Our stories went viral. Our supporters interacted directly with our team. They consoled and challenged each other on the biggest issues of the day. When a news development reanimated a structural topic Byline Times had reported on months before, we could rapidly share the impressive back catalogue of our work.

Slowly, and then all at once, everything changed.

With a second Trump presidency coming increasingly into view, Elon Musk took over Twitter. His X has crushed our reach – in the way it was meant to.

Not only did our followers (understandably) leave the platform, Musk’s algorithms deprioritised our stories in people’s feeds. Links don’t display in full. Bot armies full of personal abuse have led to our journalists disengaging.

Referrals to Byline Times’ free news site – bylinetimes.com – dropped some 90%. Matters haven’t fared much better over on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. It makes sense: the extent to which Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs see democracy as standing in their way becomes clearer by the day.

Creating Byline Supplement was one of our answers to this suppression. And, in these particularly troubling transatlantic times, we also wanted to find our way to readers further afield (achieved: around one in five of our Substack readers are located in the US and Canada).

As Byline Times reaches its seventh anniversary – in many ways, against the odds – now feels like the right time to put our flagship journalistic brand front and centre.

Despite post-truth and news fatigue, Byline Times has survived because the purpose it serves still matters. More than ever.

With no media baron, oligarch, or algorithm in sight, all of the work you currently read on our Substack is funded by subscriptions from the public to Byline Times, with its subscribers receiving an exclusive monthly print news magazine (which is also available in the news stands here in the UK).

To bring you the breadth and depth of Byline Times’ journalism, Byline Times Substack will offer much of what it currently does, but also draw much more closely from the monthly print magazine and free news site:

• Major news reports and investigations

• Long-form analysis – particularly on US politics, Big Tech, and geopolitics (areas we know many of our existing Substack subscribers are interested in)

• ‘Substack Insights’ written by members of the Byline Times team to provide further analysis on ‘the story behind the story’

• Cultural articles offering lighter and broader explorations in the mix

• Regular episodes of Byline Times Podcast and Substack Lives with the team

Because we want our work to reach as many people as possible, the vast majority of the articles published on Byline Times Substack will be free. If you are already a paid subscriber, you are absolutely at liberty to opt for a free subscription instead. But if you can afford to keep it, a paid subscription is very much appreciated.

We also hope that, if you like what you are reading and support our mission, you might also consider getting a subscription to Byline Times and joining us on our big journey to uncover the darkness – and keep the truth and light alive!

Here’s to keeping on fighting the good fight.

---

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times