The structure is the point
Nobody at Ping gets rich on your journalism.
Every organisation in this sector will tell you it cares about local journalism. The question worth asking is what happens to the money when there is some, and that is answered by a company's legal form rather than its mission statement. Ping is a Community Interest Company, a structure with legal limits on where the money can go and who is allowed to take it out.
What a Community Interest Company is
A CIC is a normal trading company with two extra constraints registered at Companies House. The first is a community interest statement saying who the company exists to benefit. The second is an asset lock, which caps what can ever be taken out for private benefit and prevents the company's assets being sold out from under its purpose.
It is regulated by the Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies, and the annual community interest report is a public document. Anyone can read ours.
Ping News CIC is company number 13649166, incorporated on 28 September 2021. You can check every word of this on the Companies House register without asking us.
In plain terms: we can trade, invoice, employ people and drive a hard bargain, like any other business. What we cannot do is treat the surplus as ours to extract at will.
What we committed to
The community interest statement is not a mission statement we wrote for the website. It is filed, it is public, and it is the thing the regulator holds us to. Ping News exists to champion the independent news sector: to support hyperlocal journalists, and to use technology to build new revenue, growth and resilience while preserving their independence.
These are the commitments that sit under it.
- Future-proofing independent news organisations through financial security
- Building connections, intimacy, trust and local knowledge
- Sustainability of the local news sector
- Securing and increasing diversity of voice
- Representing all communities and reaching new audiences
- Empowering communities to build resilience against misinformation and disinformation
- Holding power to account
- Extending quality journalism into news deserts, where local reporting has stopped altogether
- Encouraging inclusivity and plurality of voice
- Helping foster shared identity and social cohesion
There is no single fix for local journalism, which is why the work takes several forms at once: advertising, platform and licensing negotiations, and administering grant funding. The syndication platform used to be on that list. It is not any more, and we have said why.
Being precise about it
The easy version of that claim is not quite true, so here is the exact one. Ping News CIC is limited by shares, and Sam and Matt hold those shares. A CIC of this type may pay dividends, capped in aggregate at 35% of distributable profits.
So we are not forbidden from taking anything. We are permitted a capped dividend and have never taken one. The cap sits there as a backstop on whoever runs this after us.
We would rather say that than something tidier that falls apart the moment somebody reads our filings.
Why that matters here
The big regional and national publishing groups answer to shareholders. That is not a smear and it is not a scandal, it is their legal duty. But it does mean that every pound of margin found in a local newsroom has somewhere else it is obliged to go.
This is the mechanism behind two decades of closures, centralised subbing and emptied-out offices. It is not the result of anybody being a villain. It is what the structure requires.
We built Ping with the opposite structure so it would face the opposite pressure. When we negotiate a better rate, there is no investor waiting on the difference. It goes back to publishers, or into doing more of the same work.
The number
Since we incorporated on 28 September 2021 we have paid £1.8 million back to independent publishers through our various ventures.
We lead with that figure rather than a projection because it has already happened. Money that has moved is a different kind of claim from money that might.
What we take
Ping takes a commission on the revenue it brings in, and that commission funds salaries, negotiating time, administration and the unglamorous business of chasing invoices. Nobody involved is working for free, and we do not pretend otherwise.
The difference is what happens above that. A good year here does not turn into a payout. It turns into capacity: more deals chased, more publishers covered, and money put into working out new ways to support the communities we serve.
In one line
You get the big groups' terms. Nobody here takes a profit from them.
We go after the commercial terms the big groups get, without anybody having to be bought by one to receive them.
For independent publishers
Check us before you trust us.
Our filings are public. Ask us for the community interest report, ask which publishers we have paid, and ask what our commission is. Any of those we will answer directly.