reporting


Trial by crowdfunding


Nick Wallis thought the treatment of subpostmasters was scandalous, but how could he cover the story? I knew the best I could hope for from


T


he Post Office’s treatment of its subpostmasters – the people who run local post offices – is a story


the Daily Mail says “likely represents one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in the UK this century”. In parliament, it has been called a national scandal. I got involved eight years ago when a


man told me his pregnant wife had been thrown in prison for stealing £70,000 from her own Post Office. He was adamant she was innocent. It did not take long to find out dozens of subpostmasters were claiming that errors within the Post Office’s Horizon IT system had led to them losing their jobs and livelihoods. Since then, I’ve made several


investigations for the BBC, including one for Panorama. There have been two parliamentary debates, a select committee investigation, two independent investigations by forensic accountants and a mediation scheme that collapsed in acrimony. Throughout, the Post Office has


maintained it has done nothing wrong and that its Horizon system is robust. Several hundred former postmasters, however, claim they have lost money, been wrongly sacked or even prosecuted for crimes they did not commit. When the prospect of a trial came


up, I tried to stay on the story as much as possible. I went to a pre-trial hearing at which the Post Office admitted something it had told Panorama was, in fact, untrue. I was the only journalist in court and went on the One Show the same evening and reported this crucial detail, which had been let slip during hours of otherwise tedious legal horse-trading. Sadly, the One Show, for all its merits, is not geared up to cover the ins and outs of a 20-day trial.


18 | theJournalist


any broadcast news outlet was a commission to report the trial’s start and outcome. No one was going to pay me a month’s salary to sit through every day of the trial. But, if no other journalist went along, key evidence – the sort of evidence that could make this a bigger story – might go unreported. I began to think about crowdfunding.


I knew Peter Jukes had raised enough cash via Indiegogo to tweet from the phone-hacking trial, and I also looked at Byline. In the end, I decided to throw my lot in with Kickstarter, largely because of its all-or-nothing approach. Backers would only have to fulfil their pledges if I reached my £3,000 target. If I failed to reach that minimum, there would be no mess to untangle and no one would lose any money. I recorded a video, commissioned


my brother-in-law to design a logo, wrote up some rewards and launched the bid late one Friday night. My


“ ”


No one was going to pay me to sit through every day of the trial. But, if no other journalist went along, a bigger story might go unreported


promise was simple. Get me to the minimum-funding mark and, when the trial starts on November 1, I will post a daily court report online, available to all, for free. By the time I woke up the next day,


I had received more than £1,000 in pledges. Within four days, I had reached my target. Within two weeks, I was 200 per cent funded, meaning I would no longer make a loss on the project. I was astounded. Kickstarter advises compiling a list of


everyone who might be able to fund you, grouping them together and devising various strategies for targeting those groups. This is good advice, but the only strategy I used was to send a mass email to everyone I knew as soon as the project was live. This was followed by enthusiastic tweets and Facebook posts. From my dashboard of Kickstarter-


tracked site referrals, it seems the vast majority of early backers came from that email or via people who forwarded that email. Contacts, in other words, and contacts of contacts. Whatever the outcome of the trial, it will not be the end of the story. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has been carrying out its own investigation to see if any subpostmasters’ convictions should be referred to the Court of Appeal, and there is the prospect of another trial as part of the same class action happening next March. That one could be even juicier – but, right now, I’m focused on making sure I fulfil my obligations to my backers and to public interest journalism.


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