Changes at Reaction

After nine years, we are paring it back to my newsletter.

Recently elected Miss World, Finland's Marita Lindhahl, visits United Press International in Fleet Street, London in 1957 to find out how the news of her winning the title travelled home so quickly (Alamy/ 2Y7RMW8)

When a small group of us launched Reaction as a website nine years ago, we did so to create a haven for writers and readers. We set out to train young journalists, because journalism matters, when opportunities for bright next generation hacks to learn practical skills in the industry were becoming scarce.

Even the name was meant to signify that this was our small but heartfelt response, a reaction, to the way in which the tech giants were marmalising publishing, imperilling the written word and taking all the money.

In the intervening nine years, a lot of people put in a lot of hard work. For much of that time, many of us, me included, were unpaid. It was a labour of love.

The hope was always that sufficient numbers of subscribers would pay. A dedicated band did, and we know from your feedback that the work our journalists do is appreciated. But it was never quite enough to get us into profit, which would have enabled expansion. Instead, Reaction was subsidised by the efforts of key members of the team and by hugely enjoyable dinners with guest speakers - Andrew Neil, Niall Ferguson, Tim Marshall, Charles Moore, Michael Gove and many more giving their valuable time for free - that paid for our Young Journalists Programme. Almost thirty young journalists benefitted over the years by getting paid internships with Reaction, before going out into the industry.

Then, in 2022, the company that owns Reaction founded the London Defence Conference. For obvious reasons, it has grown fast and consumes almost 50% of my time.

In addition, we are very proud of the work we do for Engelsberg Ideas, which is published by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation. That exciting project - with Reaction providing editorial services for a site published in Stockholm - takes up half my time.

So you can see that almost 50% + 50% equals very little time left over for Reaction or much else in life.

That means that the Reaction website in its current form has come to the end of the road, so that we can concentrate on the LDC and Engelsberg Ideas. That’s the decision we - the management and board - took a few weeks ago.

My weekly newsletter will very much carry on, because I like writing and hopefully some of you enjoy reading it, and we will also book a leading writer to take the weeks when I am in holiday.

If you don’t want my weekly newsletter - usually 2000 words plus - and want a refund on the unused portion of your annual subscription, the team can arrange it. Subscribers can either cancel their subscription in their Substack account or email fiona@reaction.life

There is another dimension to this decision, to be frank. Across the news industry worried conversations are taking place.

The Economist recently published a good piece explaining the death of publishing as we know it.

And before that The Atlantic explained how AI summaries or overviews are shredding traffic, and threatening to cut off news publishers from the flow of new readers.

News publishing is about to become even more difficult and I admit that after nine years of fighting the good fight at Reaction I am - after 33 years in journalism - not massively optimistic about the media’s commercial future. And the London Defence Conference along with Engelsberg Ideas has taken me in a very different direction.

The biggest news brands will, one assumes, be fine. Though even they will have to wrestle with young readers not reading. Really not reading. And getting their information from an entirely different media ecosystem driven by video and audio delivered in non-traditional and increasingly surreal ways. There are suggestions the smartphone will die, to be replaced by AI-driven wearables and implants that guide decision-making and populate the field of vision. Give me a paper book or a magazine over that, any day. Most citizens, I fear, will take the tech option, though. This is what a friend of mine calls the tyranny of convenience.

For those of us who see this in civilisational terms, the existential need for writing to survive as the clearest route to thinking intelligently in a democracy, it is going to come down to a shared commitment and the support of philanthropists who believe writing matters more than ever, especially in the age of AI.

On the Reaction front, some of our writers have decided they will stay on Substack, where we hope you will find and support individual former Reaction columnists. The final Daily Briefing will go out to readers this Friday.

On behalf of the team, I want to thank you for your loyalty to Reaction over the years. We have had tremendous fun producing the site, through the Brexit wars, six UK Prime Ministers, Trump, Covid and the war in Ukraine.

But I still have plenty more to say about politics, geopolitics, history and culture if you fancy carrying on reading my newsletter.

Best regards,

Iain Martin,

Editor, Reaction