The New European was initially locked in as a four-week fiery burst of protest in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

Nine years on and freshly rebranded as The New World, it has achieved what most news outlets could only dream of: making profit without hosting ads, and reporting on controversial issues without holding back. 

Now looking to widen its reach, The New World is expanding its coverage of the global web of corrosive nationalism, disinformation and challenges to democracy. 

The New World founder and editor-in-chief Matt Kelly tells PIJI the publication helps fill an appetite for authentic independent alternatives to mainstream media. 

“We’ve always accepted that we’re a niche product and that we’re never going to compete with the Guardian or The Economist, but we don’t need to,” he says. 

“We’re a very small team of people and we have a loyal subscriber base, we have very high retention rates, so we don’t have to keep investing huge amounts of money in marketing to people.  

“We occupy … a kind of punchy centre-left position in the market, where a lot of the UK media is dominated by nationalistic right-wing populism. We present ourselves as the antidote to that.” 

The indefinitely-extended life of a pop-up 

The New European originated as a national weekly newspaper with an initial four-week run post-Brexit referendum.  

But strong sales encouraged the team to keep going, with each week’s performance considered “a referendum on the next”. 

As of July 2025, the weekly magazine (“People will pay a lot more for a magazine than they will for a newspaper,” Kelly explains) and digital offering boasts more than 35,000 subscribers. 

The title was originally owned by one of the UK’s oldest publishers, Archant. When the company was sold to a private equity group in 2020, Kelly decided to take The New European independent. 

He did so with the help of a small group high net worth investors. Even after further developing the digital side of the business, marketing, and bringing in more writers, The New European was able to break even by 2022. 

Instead of turning to the original group of investors to continue the upwards trajectory, Kelly went directly to the publication’s readers.  

The move proved fruitful; 2200 readers collectively invested £1 million ($2 million) for a 16 per cent stake in the business and the title of co-owners. 

“A lot of people just invested £15, but a number of people invested £20,000 … that was a great success for us,” Kelly says. 

Since 2022, The New European enjoyed periods of profit, including the first quarter of 2025. 

A significant investment in the publication’s recent rebrand into The New World will result in a “small loss” in the second quarter of 2025, but the hit will be cushioned by the remainders of the investment from readers-turned-co-owners. 

“It’s not a philanthropic exercise. We don’t have funding from very wealthy people, we don’t take grants from organisations … we don’t even take advertising,” Kelly says. 

“It’s purely based on reader revenue. 

“And when I got to the point where there were enough readers paying for the product to make it break even, then I realised that this thing can stay for as long as we like.” 

An ad-free rarity 

As the news industry faces increasing financial pressure on multiple fronts, most prominently from tech giants vacuuming much-needed clicks, advertising is often a sought-after revenue source. 

When The New European first emerged, it was a tough sell to advertisers; it was not meant to last long, and was politically “spiky,” Kelly says. 

Then, as weeks turned into years and its audience grew, ads became an option.  

But the publication’s team decided factors like the necessary investment in commercially-focused staff and taking away room for journalism on pages in favour of ads were not worth it. 

“It’s a good pitch to say, ‘The only people we care about are the subscribers. We don’t care about pleasing advertisers,’” Kelly adds. 

“That said, at some point in the future, I wouldn’t completely rule out advertising. But for now … it’s more trouble than it’s worth for us.” 

Balancing growth and the truth 

At time of writing, about 97 per cent of The New World’s audience is UK-based. 

Kelly hopes the title change from The New European will help open overseas markets, and plans to spend the immediate future focusing on broadening and innovating distribution. 

“From a business point of view, the biggest challenge isn’t journalism, it’s distribution and marketing,” he says. 

“There’s so much diversity of opinion, and there’s so many titles out there, how do we get what we do in front of the right people?” 

Many outreach paths on social media are well-worn, so finding new and exciting tools to get in touch with audiences is the main goal. 

Kelly credits former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss’ Substack-hosted The Free Press as a good example, despite its content positioned on the other end of the political spectrum from The New World. Launched in 2022, The Free Press has rapidly gained more than 150,000 paid subscribers, and in July 2025, Weiss was reported to be seeking a valuation of up to US$250 million (A$377 million) for the company ahead of a potential sale to Skydance. 

“If you are just a vanilla content provider, you’re in a lot of trouble,” Kelly says. 

“But if you can really have an emotional attachment to your audience and that’s reciprocated, then I think you’ve got a great chance of building a business.” 

As to how journalists can balance an emotional connection with audiences against a general responsibility towards impartiality, Kelly does not feel journalists have an obligation to be “even-handed”. 

He tells PIJI journalism must be partial towards the truth, but too many newsrooms are scared of reporting things their audience might not want to hear. 

These concerns are understandable amidst the constant fight to retain audiences, but Kelly says refraining from reporting on contentious issues, such as Israel’s starvation of Gaza, to avoid upset is a “recipe for disaster”.  

“There’s a great risk of false equivalence, where … journalists think that because they’ve got somebody saying X, they need somebody else to say Y, and I don’t agree with that,” he says. 

“Our experience has been that if … you absolutely go to every length you can to make sure what you’re saying is accurate, but you present it in a very vigorous way as well, people actually really appreciate that.” 

“I would sooner go out of business but do so because we were publishing what I thought was important, than stay in business and just try to please everybody. That’s not impartiality, that’s editorial stupidity and cowardice.” 

Written by Sezen Bakan