“We brought what was a very successful blog audience to a much broader platform,” Nancy Mendoza said, “so that we could deal with more issues, and do that on a daily basis with a really good team of writers.”



The team is now formed of six editors and around 25 writers, who all work in a virtual newsroom operated by Yammer, a social network used for private communications. The pitching process, Nancy said, is pretty traditional: “A writer pitches an article, an editor agrees that that can be written, or not, the article is written and then it goes through several steps through copy editing, and final editorial publishing stage." The process is similar when editors write pieces, which some frequently do, and the writers all work on a freelance basis.

Two former Canary writers BuzzFeed News spoke to, who did not want to be named, also said that each writer had four hours to write after the pitch was accepted, and that for each article they wrote, they had to copy-edit someone else’s piece.

The editors get the last look at the piece before it is published “then there will probably be a back and forth on what the headline will be – they suggest that writers submit three different headlines, all quite clickbaity stuff,” one former writer said.

The “clickbaity” remark is linked to The Canary’s unorthodox business model. Out of the website's net profit, 50% goes to writers, 10% to section editors, 20% to the leadership team, and the remaining 20% is retained by the company itself which has two directors – Kerry-Anne Mendoza and the newly-appointed Andrew Rose. There is, however, a second step for some writers where they get paid a “flat rate” linked to the number of articles they have written.

“The top-up payment available to writers is based directly on the percentage of web traffic that an article generates,” Nancy said. The more page views an article gets, the more money the writer is paid, which online media specialist Matt Locke says can have a worrying effect on the nature of content published.

"If you incentivise writers to focus on hits, you get fast-turnaround hot takes and clickbait," explained Locke, the founder of Storythings and publisher of How We Get to Next. "It also reinforces filter bubbles – if writers are incentivised for hits, they'll write articles that they know will get shared by the publication's hardcore audience. They're less likely to write more nuanced articles, or to challenge their audience's preconceptions."

Another consequence, one of the former Canary writers told BuzzFeed News, is the discrepancy in pay: “You can earn anything from £100 to £4,000 month depending on how viral you go." He claims he only managed to earn around £200 in three months of writing and copy-editing three articles a week, and called The Canary’s business model “hyper-capitalistic”.

Another former writer told BuzzFeed News that he decided to leave because he was “struggling to contribute enough articles and copy edits while also having to work in a full-time job, leading to fatigue”.

He was also “uneasy about some of the hyperbolic headlines the editors were asking us to come up with for our articles”, which he found “a little embarrassing”.

A particularly strong example of such a headline was a piece published on 19 April: “A junior doctor has killed herself, leaving a message to Jeremy Hunt in her suicide note.”

The story, written by Kerry-anne Mendoza, covered the death of junior doctor Rose Polge and was based heavily on a BBC report published a week earlier which mentioned that a note found in Polge's car "included a passing reference to health secretary Jeremy Hunt".

Though first acknowledging that “people rarely commit suicide or suffer mental health crises over one event or issue alone”, the Canary article on the death wrote “Jeremy Hunt is providing the kind of stresses on junior doctors which can foster and exacerbate mental health crisis”, and if he “had a shred of dignity or respect, he would hand in his resignation today”.

