Former Techcrunch staffers have joined a new title covering the defence tech industry which has just expanded after a successful fundraising round.
Resilience Media has an editorial team of around ten people and is publishing a mixture of news and thought leadership articles on Substack. The title charges subscribers £8 per month or £80 per year.
Co-founder and publisher Leslie Hitchcock told Press Gazette the goal is for Resilience Media to be “the publication of record” for the defence technology industry and a “must-read” for anyone interested in innovation and technology “supporting the defence of democracy”.
The brand first launched with a conference last year, with the Resilience Conference held in London in September for international start-ups, investors, and customers in the security, defence, and resilience sectors.
Hitchcock is a former Techcrunch director of international events, who left the publisher after almost nine years in 2020, while co-founder and editor-in-chief Dr Tobias Stone is a tech entrepreneur.
Hitchcock said they felt that by combining their experience there was “something that we could do to support Ukraine in what we saw as its fight for democracy for all of us”.
She said Resilience aims to bring together investors, founders, people in Government, military and industry to “understand how together we could all work for the defence of our democracy by centring start-up technology in that conversation”.
They felt that “there was nobody covering the topic in the way that we felt could be useful, could be valuable to everybody in those sectors and then also beyond – if we’re going to be in a tricky position in terms of the threat to our democracies from bad actors, then even the general public needs to start understanding what that actually means”.
The media company officially launched a few weeks after the conference and has been “steadily building” since there.
Techcrunch cutbacks made ‘dream list’ of hires available
But raising seed funding over the last few months has allowed it to bring in several key editorial hires, many of whom are also ex-Techcrunch journalists. They include former Techcrunch international managing editor Ingrid Lunden as managing editor and former Techcrunch managing editor Matt Burns to run a start-up showcase linked to the conference.
Three editors-at-large are also former Techcrunch staffers: John Biggs (ex-Techcrunch editor and Gizmodo editor), Natasha Lomas (ex-senior reporter) and Jonathan Shieber (ex-senior editor).
There are also journalists specifically covering the Baltics (Julia Gifford), Central and Western Europe (ex-Techcrunch freelance Anna Heim), and Ukraine (Oleksandr Ihnatenko), plus former Techcrunch reporters Carly Page covering cybersecurity and Paul Sawers covering open source and general start-up news.
Following vast changes in its leadership and editorial team, this year Techcrunch was bought out by private equity and soon made its staff in the UK and Europe redundant, although its new owner denied it was pulling out of the region and insisted it would double down on coverage.
Tech reporting has also seen recent cutbacks at the likes of Business Insider and Ziff Davis – although small and/or specialist publications that are less traffic dependent and are linked to “hot market areas” are often able to better monetise today.
Hitchcock told Press Gazette the journalists Resilience has hired are all people who would have been on her “dream list”.
“It just so happened that Techcrunch was changing its business model at the time that we were expanding ours.”
She said Resilience aims to publish a “combination of breaking start-up news in Techcrunch style, which is exciting and fast-paced, combined with thought leadership that you might find at RUSI [Royal United Services Institute] or at Chatham House. And so this team builds that foundation of the direction in which we intend to grow.”
Hitchcock admitted it is an “interesting time to choose to launch a publication But… it has been really interesting experiencing the rise of more niche publications, or solo journalist publications, with them actually being able to sustain their work based on either their own reputation or focusing on a specific topic.”
She added that this is “not exactly new”, citing the success of Coindesk covering crypto from 2013.
“I think that that was really where we started to see this splintering, shall we say, from generalist coverage to, here’s a topic, and there’s a very dedicated audience, very interested in this topic and you can build a company out of that.”
Resilience has agreed not to name the investors who have come on board as part of its seed funding to protect their security due to the sensitive nature of the defence industry. But it said they are all from NATO or Allied countries – the UK, the US, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Poland.
It has also set up a governance structure with articles of association ensuring that the investors cannot influence or interfere in coverage, Hitchcock said, as well as an editorial board drawing from the likes of the BBC, Financial Times and GCHQ to act as an extra layer of protection.
She noted: “When we first did Resilience Conference, a lot of people thought they could just pay to be on the stage. And even though we didn’t have a media company behind us yet, we programmed the entire conference as if we did, maintaining that separation so you could pay to sponsor, but that did not give you any right to be on the stage. That was all earned media. So we’re going to be continuing that at the conferences and on the publication.”
The conference remains a key revenue stream for the brand, Hitchcock said, while the expansion as a result of the seed funding aims to build “a product that hopefully people would pay for” either through subscriptions or sponsorships from mission-aligned organisations in the style of underwriting at US public radio like NPR.
And while Resilience Media started out on Substack as it meant a “simple way of getting started” for the co-founders, Hitchcock has not ruled out exploring “what does it look like to grow off of a platform like that?
But she described Substack as “a nice way for people to be able to have their own perspective and points of view and their own branding, but in a somewhat confined environment. Also, the readership that you find on Substack is incredibly dedicated to topics. They’re there asking to receive newsletters on a specific topic. And so we found very strong readership there.”
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