Investigative journalism website Exaro has closed just a week after installing new leadership and insisting that it was open for business.

A board meeting on Wednesday agreed the decision, which is thought to be related to changes across parent company New Sparta. The news came as a shock to staff, who were expecting the site’s work to continue.

The preceding Friday Exaro had announced that David Hencke, the former Guardian journalist who has been behind some of the organisation’s biggest stories, would take over as head of of the operation, sharing responsibility for running the site with another existing Exaro employee, Mark Conrad, who was to become news editor.

At the time of his appointment, Hencke said: “Exaro is open for business continuing and there are no redundancies planned. We will continue our investigations and challenging stories.”

The appointments followed the decision to begin dismissal proceedings against founding editor-in-chief Mark Watts.

Last month, Watts said he had been told that he was being made redundant and claimed that the company planned to halve its editorial budget. The company subsequently began dismissal proceedings against him.

Speaking to the Guardian following news of the closure, Watts called on the company’s ultimate owner, Jerome Booth, to ensure employees and casual staff were paid what they were owed. Booth has ploughed money into Exaro, which operates as part of his New Sparta group, which runs various businesses in areas such as insurance, asset management and business media.

Though Exaro has hit above its weight in pushing stories into the public eye, a number of attempts to build a business model around the coverage, such as charging for data services and events, have failed to take off.

Though Watts said Booth had been a generous backer, he criticised what he said was a lack of vision from those managing the site’s commercial operation.

“One of the things that has been very frustrating has been the lack of direction in terms of commercial strategy,” Watts said. “The stupidity of announcing to the world you are open for business is another example of the constant lack of direction from a commercial point of view.”

Requests for comment to Exaro commercial director Sean Allison and representatives of Jerome Booth were not immediately returned.

Despite its small size, Exaro has broken a number of high-profile stories, including a string of allegations about alleged child abuse by senior figures in government and politics that have prompted follow-ups by other media outlets and police investigations.

However, its role in publishing allegations of a paedophile ring centred around Dolphin Square in London has proved controversial. In March, the Metropolitan police’s Operation Midland investigation, which relied heavily on evidence provided by one of Exaro’s main sources, known as Nick, collapsed.



Its publishing of an early draft of the review into the BBC’s handling of abuse by Jimmy Savile was described as “irresponsible” by its author Dame Janet Smith, but the site said the leak had pushed forward the publication date.

Watts added that he expected the impact of Exaro’s journalism to continue to “reverberate” after its closure.