The co-owner of SWNS, the UK’s largest independent news agency, has credited its diversified business model and “a culture of excellence” for its success as it celebrates half a century in business.
Still based in its home city of Bristol, today SWNS has reporters around the country, a secondary office in London and says it is the largest supplier of content to the national media after the corporate news agencies.
Its 50 staff reporters, editors and photographers continue to regularly supply headline news to the national press: most recently, it sourced bombshell footage of Labour MP Mike Amesbury appearing to punch a constituent (who has since been charged over the incident).
Only PA Media, which is owned by a consortium of major UK news publishers, is larger than SWNS which is privately owned by three of its directors.
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SWNS has always produced ‘a lot of high-calibre people’, says editor
Martin Winter, who also serves as director and editor at SWNS, told Press Gazette that what was to become the South West News Service launched in “the Fleet Street boom days in the mid-70s, when papers had a lot of money to spend”.
“The only way you could find out what was going on in the regions was to have eyes and ears on the ground, and that’s what agencies were. SWNS is one of many agencies that sprung up all over the country to do that.”
The number of those news agencies still running has been whittled down over the last few decades. But SWNS Media Group recorded growing turnover of £23.7m in its most recent accounts.
In part, Winter put the longevity of SWNS down to its staff.
“I just think it’s had a culture of excellence right from the start, and as a result it produced quite a lot of high-calibre people who went on to do very well. And that culture has always continued to exist here, and I think because of that we grew and became one of the bigger agencies… It’s kind of set the tone for the culture of the business.”
It helps, he adds, that those alumni have often ended up occupying significant roles in the media, and as a result “we have lots of friends across Fleet Street and beyond”.
Former SWNS staff include the current editors of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, Tony Gallagher and Chris Evans, as well as former Sunday Telegraph editor Ian MacGregor, former Sunday Mirror editor Tina Weaver, former Sunday People editor James Scott, former Sun editor Stuart Higgins and current Sun head of news Alex Goss.
“If people leave with that enthusiasm for what we do, they take it with them, and that positivity feeds itself back over the years,” Winter said.
[Read more: National editors pay tribute to SWNS at 50 — UK’s biggest independent news agency]
But he also credited the agency’s endurance to the diversification of its business, saying: “We have found new ways of monetising what we do. We’ve always tried to be innovative in what we do.”
Today the sourcing of stories for the national press is just one part of the wider SWNS business, contributing around a fifth of turnover. Other revenue streams include PR firm 72Point, market research panel OnePoll, creative design studio Oath and, since last year, commercial imagery business PinPep.
Winter said 72Point in particular “has proved quite pivotal in allowing SWNS to endure at the size and scale that it does”. The firm was created in 2000, he said, when SWNS was frequently receiving press releases for stories which were interesting, but required a lot of work from the journalists to polish up.
“And we thought, well, there’s probably a commercial opportunity in this.”
Kept at “a bit of an arm’s length”, Winter said 72Point is now “our biggest profit driver… they help to fund our journalism, effectively”.
The addition of other revenue streams was to some extent necessitated by challenges to the traditional news agency business model.
“We don’t get paid any more by newspapers for what we do than we did when I started in this business probably 25 years ago,” Winter said. “The rates have literally not changed.”
The National Association of Press Agencies made this same point in February, complaining over rates it said had not increased in as much as 40 years.
“We’ve always just had the attitude that we don’t moan about it,” he continued. “I don’t think there’s any point in us doing that and alienating those clients who are still very important to us. We just got on with finding a different way of doing things and it enables us to still carry on giving them a good service.”
Decline of regional media means local story tips are more likely to come from social media
As it has branched out into other business areas, the news agency side of SWNS has also changed with the times.
“The UK national newspapers and websites are still our biggest chunk of revenue,” Winter said, “but we now sell to probably pretty much every country in the world, either directly or through distribution partners.”
The business now sells features content, as well as news, and it works with broadcast companies to “move on” its biggest stories.
Winter said “we probably do less of the nuts and bolts, boots on the ground journalism that we did in years gone by”, which he attributed to “the shrinking of that news ecosystem in the regions”.
“If something remarkable happened to you, back in the day, you would have gone down to your local newspaper office and told them. These days, you put it on social media, and that’s where we try and find those stories.”
But he said “we still do that real journalism — contacting people, interviewing them, verifying things, getting them to sign things that [agree] they’re happy to have their story told, and then speaking to other people who might be involved and piecing it together, like with any other story”.
The agency has also made a significant expansion into video. Winter said SWNS distributes about 30 videos a day and sells about £1m’s worth a year. Much of the original video is shot by SWNS photographers, but part of the mix is licensed user generated content sourced from the web.
The biggest buyers for that video content are major SWNS customers like Mail Online, The Sun and Reach, but Winter added the agency distributes content through deals with MSN and Yahoo and that it has partners who sell SWNS video on to the likes of Newsflare, Reuters and AP.
“Obviously, a good video will travel anywhere in the world, so it’s enabled us to grow beyond the traditional publishing market, which is increasingly constrained here in the UK.”
A good video will also appear in a lot of places: “The publishers use our material now in so many different ways. [Content] used to go in the newspaper and on their website, and now they use it across Youtube, Snap, Tiktok — they’ll use it multiple times, in multiple different ways.”
‘A more shareable version of news’
SWNS scoops have included news of Queen Camilla’s divorce from Andrew Parker-Bowles and the video of Princess Kate at a Windsor farm shop in March that followed her absence from public life after a surgery.
Winter said there are a few things SWNS looks for in a story.
“Increasingly it is about the visuals. It’s one of the first things we’ll always ask in any story we do: ‘what are the pictures like?’
“But beyond that it also just has to have that ‘’cor blimey’ element — I call it the pub test. If it’s something you go down the pub and tell your mates about then it’s clearly something which is worth spreading…
“We do everything from court cases to human interest stories to medical breakthroughs. But it’s, just gotta have that little bit of quirky difference that makes you sit up and go: ‘I’ve never heard that before’.”
The modern spin is that today SWNS looks for “a more shareable version of news”, Winter said.
“A lot of that very local newsy content is only of interest to one of our audiences, which is the UK national media. But we now sell internationally… so we tend to look for stuff that is more globally appealing than UK-centric, because that is time consuming and hard to come by.”
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