“Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” — G.K. Chesterton, 1914
“How healthy are chickpeas?” — The New York Times, 2025
A few months ago, the chief executive of one of the UK’s largest media companies gave an astonishing interview. Not because of anything he said, exactly. He was entirely predictable, right down to his denial that he was running a “clickbait organisation”.
Instead, the real bombshell was buried a few paragraphs down: the revelation that, on one day that week, his star reporter had written one hundred and six articles.
Which, to be fair, is quite the feat. When I was a shifting reporter at a national newspaper ten years ago, my record for one sitting was eight. My editor was delighted. (The Pulitzer, alas, is still in the post.)
But then much has changed over the past decade, as readers became increasingly viewed as passive consumers. In this brave new world shaped by algorithms and "traffic", in-depth reporting — mistakenly deemed a luxury — was first for the chop, swiftly followed by the reporters themselves, who in some cases were replaced by robots. Slightly more fortunate were the op-ed writers, who kept their jobs on the condition they would trade their opinions for online outrage. Meanwhile, the crinkles of their readers’ lives — their aspirations, hopes, quirks and concerns — were firmly ironed out. No wonder they stopped paying attention.
Arguably, then, today might seem like the worst time to launch a magazine committed to old-school reportage and features. But what if it’s also the best?
In a very different interview, way back in 1961, Arthur Miller described a newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”. It was, he explained, a publication written for its readers. One that would keep them informed, yes, but also one that would listen to and tell their stories — with all the eccentricities, joys and tragedies that life entails. Journalism, in other words, was supposed to be a conversation.
This is where Dispatch comes in. We want to have that conversation again.
What does that mean in practice?
Well, it means that, as a Dispatch reader, you’ll never be reduced to a click or a vessel for someone else’s opinion. You’ll never be patronised. You’ll never be bored. You’ll never be told something is important when it’s not.
Instead, fuelled by journalism's forgotten frontier spirit, Dispatch will always take you and its subjects seriously. We will always surprise you. We will always make you think. We will always take the absurd seriously and treat the serious with doubt.
At heart, we are a magazine — online, for now — committed to deeply reported features and curious interviews, to good stories told by good storytellers. This doesn't mean they will always be easy to read. Our pieces will make you feel wonder and delight, as well as anger and revulsion — and sometimes all at once. That is, after all, the essence of life on the frontier: the impulse to seek out that restless relationship between beauty and coarseness, and to converse with it.
But that’s enough for today. You can read more here. For now, welcome to Dispatch. Welcome to the frontier. We are everything the media was supposed to be — and everything it isn’t.