Note written by Milan Rai (the then Peace News editor) for the Peace News Board, 16 June 2024.

1) Introduction

I’ve spent quite a lot of time going through the numbers here because I think a lot of folk on the Board are hoping that we will be able to keep something like the current set-up going post-transition. By ‘current set-up’, I mean a 24-page nearly-A3-sized newsprint magazine printed and posted out every two months. I think this will be pretty much impossible, but this paper lays out some options for

(a) trying to keep the current publication set-up going and

(b) trying to keep PN a physical paper-based magazine.

2) Ambitious Projects

In talking about a future, post-transition, paper-based PN magazine, there are two categories of future we could be talking about. One is ‘Ambitious Projects’, where we try to secure large grants and bring in a much higher level of supporter/sustainer donations in order to fund a Big Ambitious Project. The other category is ‘Core Work’, where we see what can be done with just PNT funding and something like the current level of subscriber/sustainer financial support.

3) Ambitious Paper Project I: Status Quo

What if we tried to replicate the current set-up in its entirety, including the paid staff levels?

We’re in a bit of a weird situation right now, where Claire has left the admin job, and Gabriel and I are covering it at a much reduced wage rate. If we went back to the 2022 set-up of PN in the post-transition period, with six part-time positions amounting to 56 hours a week, and we uprated hourly wages to £17.11 to keep up with inflation over the past three years, then the new wage bill in 2025 would be £49,820.

If we kept the other categories of expenditure roughly as they are at the moment, the expenditure in 2025 might look something like this:

Wage bill (uprated by 11.3 percent): £50k a year

Printing and postage of the paper: £11k a year*

Non-paper costs (promo expenses, travel, IT etc): £19k a year

Total expenditure: £80k a year

*There is likely to be significant inflation in paper, printing and postage costs over the period 2025–2030, which this figure tries to take account of. The actual printing/postage costs in 2022–2023 were £10.3k.

Against that, our non-PNT income might look like this:

Subs/sales £12.5k a year

Donations and appeal £5.5k a year

Renting half the office £2.8k a year

Books/merchandise £0.2k a year

Total non-PNT income: £21k a year

PNT have said they are going to continue financial support at around £21k a year. I find this hard to believe. I think it would be more prudent to peg it at £14k a year (2025 – 2030).

Total income (incl PNT £21k/£14k): £42k a year/£35k a year

In other words, in order to maintain the status quo (our current staffing levels, producing PN as it is right now), we would need annual grant-funding/extra donations post-transition of either £38k a year or (more likely) £45k a year. Does anyone think this is realistic?

4) Ambitious Paper Projects II, III, and so

There are ways of reducing the wage bill and other aspects of the budget but, however you slice it, I think it is difficult to see any grant funder willing to maintain the current publication model (a 24-page newsprint magazine printed and posted out every two months) indefinitely.

I could maybe see a funding body maybe get excited about a regular 24-page magazine as part of a time-limited project (a peace education push aimed at school students and young people; an attempt to shift the culture of the climate direct action movement; an arts/culture intervention to inject nonviolence into mainstream culture; and so on).

5) Core Work

While we wait for the grants to roll in to fund an Ambitious Project (whether that’s a paper-based magazine or something else), we could continue to do something even with the limited funds we had coming in. Obviously, it is possible that we might wait years to raise a big bunch of money for the chosen Ambitious Project – or we might never raise the grants needed to carry it out.

What about trying to keep PN going as a paper-based magazine without outside grant funding? In other words, as ‘Core Work’.

6) Status quo but voluntary

The only way to keep PN going as it is today (24pp, six times a year) without external grant funding would be for it to be entirely, or almost-entirely, a volunteer project.

There are maybe three main options here.

• The simplest is that PN is just all-volunteer, like Schnews used to be. Schnews was a single, double-sided A4 sheet with very brief news reports and events listings, produced out of Brighton. If you sent them stamps, they would send you a physical copy.
• Or we could follow Red Pepper, which for many years only had one paid member of staff, an outreach worker who also did some co-ordination of the volunteer working groups who did all the work (editing, web work, layout, admin, finance) needed to keep the magazine going. (Red Pepper is currently a 70-page quarterly magazine with a £6 cover price.)
• Or we could use the Freedom model, from when it was a printed paper. Freedom also only had one paid member of staff: the layout person, the post we call ‘production worker’. Again, editing, website stuff, admin, finance and so on was all done by volunteers.

In terms of the finances, if we keep the income the same as now, but reduce the PNT contribution, the situation might look like this:

Subscriptions/sales £12.5k a year

Donations and appeal £5.5k a year

Renting half the office £2.8k a year

Books/merchandise £0.2k a year

PNT support £14k a year*

Total income (incl PNT £14k): £35k a year**

*I’ve been conservative about PNT support.

**Note that until the loss of the £100k Dabner investment, £35k a year was PNT’s annual financial contribution to PNL, with over £20k of subs/sales/donations/appeals/rent income coming on top of that.

• In the Schnews all-volunteer model, £35k a year could cover the current printing and postage (£11k) and free up an enormous amount for the paper itself and for promotional work (leaflets and so on). The Schnews model could actually enable PN to appear more frequently, on better/100% recycled paper, and/or with more pages! The simplest move would be to go back to appearing 10 times a year, which would mean printing/postage costs going from £11k to around £18.5k a year, leaving £12.5k for promotional work, IT, volunteers’ expenses and other costs.

• In the Red Pepper model, the £35k could cover the current printing and postage (£11k); employ a paid co-ordinator on two days a week (roughly £14.5k a year) a well as generating £9.5k a year for promo leaflets etc, IT, stationery and other non-printing/postage costs. [Printing & postage £11k + co-ordinator £14.5k + other costs £9.5k = £35k]
• In a Freedom+ version, the £35k could cover the current printing and postage (£11k); employ a layout person for nine days’ production six times a year (roughly £7.5k a year) plus another part-timer – maybe an admin person – doing a-day-a-week (roughly £7k a year); and provide £9.5k a year for promo costs, IT, stationery and other non-printing/postage costs. [Printing & postage £11k + production worker £7.5k + admin £3.5k + other costs £9k = £31k]

Any of these routes would mean a massive re-organisation and relaunch for PN, requiring the recruitment of a large number of skilled volunteers.

As I understand it, Red Pepper has depended a lot on volunteers who have well-paid jobs in London NGOs. It is a high-status magazine launched by the Socialist Movement, a product of the Labour Left in its heyday. (Interestingly, its constitution says that the Red Pepper board must be made up of an equal number of representatives of investors, staff and the Socialist Movement, with the SM having a ‘charter share’ to protect against the takeover of the company by unfriendly forces.)

If one of these volunteer-based routes is chosen, my advice would be to cut the number of pages sharply for the first few issues, and to build up slowly to 24pp when the required stable of editors and contributors has been put together.

7) IF Stone’s Weekly/Fortnightly/Monthly

At the other end of the scale, we could keep PN a regularly-posted-out paper magazine if it shrank a lot and adopted a very old model.

IF Stone was a radical reporter who was shut out of US journalism in the 1950s because of his left-wing views. He started his own four-page newssheet, called I.F. Stone’s Weekly, in 1953. It started appearing fortnightly in the late 1960s and then ran as I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly until the paper closed 1971. It was an important critical voice against the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with a circulation of 70,000 at its peak, when the anti-war movement was strongest.

A Core Work Peace News could become a version of this, with maybe eight A4 pages, posted out as often as money allowed. If it followed the IF Stone template, it would mainly be an essay analysing what was going on and countering propaganda, plus some short news stories. If it was eight pages, it could have an events listings at the end.

The non-subs/donations finances might look something like this:

Renting half the office £2.8k a year

Books/merchandise £0.2k a year

PNT support £14k a year

Non-supporter income (incl PNT £14k): £17k a year

This £17k a year could pay for an editorial/admin worker two days a week (£14.5k), who would write and layout the paper and do the absolutely necessary admin – with £2.5k for other office costs.

The frequency of the paper would depend on how much people contributed. For example, if we had 500 people contributing £15k a year,

Subscriptions/sales £10k a year (down from £12.5k)

Donations and appeal £5k a year (down from £5.5k)

This would pay for a fortnightly mailing (£15k / £550 per mailing to 500 people = 27 mailings). The average contribution would have to be above £30 a year per sustainer for it to stay fortnightly.

If revenue did drop, the frequency of production would also be reduced – but paid hours would remain the same, because they’re not linked to subs/donations income.

There would still be some voluntary work in this option, doing the mailings for example.

8) Schnews Mk II

We could continue to produce Peace News as a paper magazine in the Schnews tradition by just having a single double-sided A4 sheet with very, very brief (one-sentence) news stories of what’s going on, and listings of events – and only post it out to folk who sent us stamps. I won’t set out any possible sums, it could be very similar to the last option in financial terms, employing someone and so on – just different in terms of content.

9) Remaining a Paper Project, Core Work and The Web

The budget for Core Work is very slimmed-down. Core Work is all about priorities.

The implication of the Core Work suggestions above is that, if the Board is committed as a priority to PN remaining a regularly-posted-out paper magazine, if that is the most important thing, then (unless we go down the entirely-volunteer Schnews route) there will be no money for web hosting, web work, creating, maintaining or upgrading websites and so on, until either PN receives a big grant for an Ambitious Project or PNT is able to consistently contribute a larger amount.

If there is a web presence for a paper-focused new Core Work PN, it seems it would have to be virtually free and involve no paid time.