British journalist Mike Leidig was running a million-pound news operation when rivals tried to close him down with allegations of a globe-spanning fake news empire with claims that derailed years of award-winning investigations, books, and documentaries. But he fought back, and now, a decade later, he has founded newsX: a Community Interest Company designed as a one-stop base for independent reporting that is both sustainable and scalable.
The foreign editor at The Sunday Telegraph sounded almost embarrassed when she rang to tell me the paper had won a Paul Foot Award from my exclusive investigation into the trafficking in women.
I’d been working on that story for months, tipped off by a social worker in Vienna who was seeing more and more victims arriving in the Austrian capital. So when the Sunday Telegraph foreign desk reached out looking for a powerful piece to front the paper’s relaunch, it was offered and accepted. We then went on to create not just a series of articles, but a full campaign, and then the media spotlight moved on.
By the time I heard about the award months later, we had already completed dozens of other stories for the Telegraph. And yes, I knew the Paul Foot Award existed, but I’d never paid it much attention. Agency journalists don’t collect trophies. Big titles do, and even the annual British Press Agency awards invariably end up presented to journalists whose names are nowhere on the work that wins the trophy.
This time my name wasn’t on the article either, and only The Sunday Telegraph would be engraved on the prize, she explained, though I was welcome to attend the ceremony.
Turning up to watch someone else collect the award wasn’t of much interest, and I declined. But there was still a neat ending for my agency. When I learned the award came with a £5,000 prize, and that £1,000 was still owed for the work, I suggested they use one to settle the other. They paid in full the next day. It was a tidy conclusion, and a useful reminder of why independent news organisations struggle to justify investigative work. Recognition is uncertain, and payment is often slower.
Small wonder there is so much pressure to subsidise journalism with sponsorship and PR. That can compromise an investigation before it has even begun, because the reader can no longer tell where reporting ends and messaging starts. I saw that during an undercover investigation into the drugs trade in Albania, when we exposed how narcotics routed through the country were flooding into Europe. At the same time, The Economist ran a glowing report about Albania’s modern, reformist government. I was subsequently bombarded with claims my work was “fake”, and it was a hard accusation to defend against. Who would you trust: The Economist, or an agency whose name people associate with stories about two-headed tortoises and other viral tabloid tales?
This problem was nothing new. Since Central European News was founded in 1995, we have always worked across a spectrum as wide as the media network we work for. For one group, we produced quirky, human-interest stories that bigger agencies often ignored. On the other, we did long-form features, investigations, TV documentaries, radio packages and ultra-niche specialist reporting for the trade press. But the much-maligned short-form work was never an embarrassment or a bolt-on. It was the steady, sellable feed that kept the lights on and, crucially, paid for the long-form journalism and other content.
The two belong under one roof. Short-form writers are the SWAT team that kicks the door in, goes in with all guns blazing and makes a lot of noise. The in-depth features that follow are the forensic unit that comes afterwards, verifies, and nails it down. That mix was how we funded deeper investigations for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, the Observer, the Mail on Sunday and others, without handing the steering wheel to PR.
But it’s also how I ended up with a second “award”, one that, as far as I know, has only ever been handed out once in the history of the world: being labelled not just a globe-spanning fake news factory, but the king of fake news factories or, to use the wording of BuzzFeed that gave me the title, “The King of Bullsh*t News”.
Naturally, not a word of the 7,000 words under that headline was true. But what still surprises me, even now, is how little of it was driven by evidence-based journalism. When disclosure from my legal case against them later dragged the internal emails into daylight, it read less like a newsroom following a trail and more like a newsroom falling in love with a headline and trying to find a story to go with it.
I found they had learned about my agency via a Press Gazette piece, and the detail that mattered wasn’t the quality of our reporting, but the fact we were a significant source of MailOnline content. From there, the idea hardened: CEN could stand in for everything they wanted to say about “quirky” viral news, and if the label landed, the rest would take care of itself.
And then, almost inevitably, the conversation snapped back to what the piece was really built around: the headline. Could they strengthen the hed? Could they make it “inside the fake news factory”? Different versions were floated, but the one they kept circling was the one they’d started with all along: “The King of Bullsh*t News”. Once that was agreed, the emails and Slack chats show how the tone changes. There’s a sense of relief, even celebration, and the machinery shifts into promotion mode, and activism, not journalism. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the headline, or rather the label, was the point, and everything else was written to make it fit.
The BuzzFeed team ploughed ahead even though they were aware of the hypocrisy problem. BuzzFeed’s lead writer would spend the day writing stories on how Game Of Thrones made him horny, and at the same time he and his CEN project team would be trying to work around the awkward fact that BuzzFeed had used our material too, and how they would need to add generic corrections or disclaimers to older posts to cover themselves.
When our lawyers wrote in to complain, Ben Smith’s instinct wasn’t to pick apart the substance to see if they needed to make any corrections, but rather to treat the letter as yet more content for the narrative: upload it, link to it and quote it, as if the complaint itself could be folded into the package.
They published it a decade ago, when BuzzFeed was valued at $1.7 billion and employed hundreds of editorial staff. As headlines go, I would struggle to find a more efficient way to take down a media business.
For 24 hours, I considered quitting. Then, after my wife agreed that we should fight, I carried on with three objectives: to clear my name, deny my accusers the satisfaction of shutting me down, and rebuild what we had created so it would be bulletproof against the next attack.
It took hours no junior doctor would accept, seven-day weeks, and a level of financial strain I would not recommend to anyone. But we did it. We are still here, producing content that changes the world and attracts millions of views, while BuzzFeed has since lost around 98 per cent of its value, shut down BuzzFeed News, and retreated to the lighter, viral fare it was built on in the first place.
And after all this, when I realised that the strategy we had built to survive the new media landscape could be used by others operating in the same space, it became the blueprint for newsX.
The BuzzFeed years clarified something larger. What happened to me wasn’t a freak, isolated incident. It was a microcosm of how the modern media economy works, creating a negative feedback loop: clickbait, echo chambers and native advertising get rewarded, while investigations and genuinely independent reporting get priced out in a race to the bottom. And it’s getting worse.
A lot of money has been poured into “saving journalism”, and the funding is harder and harder to come by. No surprise, really, because much of it has been wasted, with fixes built on a shallow understanding of what actually broke. My work at NAPA (the British National Association of Press Agencies) helped me see the mechanics. The BuzzFeed experience changed the frame. I began confused, then angry, then, unexpectedly, fascinated. That was the moment newsX stopped being a survival plan and became an opportunity: to build something independent of investor ties, focused on the working community of journalists at its core.
The centre of the solution is a hard separation between news and PR, and a system that credits the people who actually create the work. If that sounds like a journalist’s nirvana, an impossible return to a world that no longer exists, that’s because until recently it was. But now it isn’t just a wish list. It is a blueprint that has become a working model, designed to put purpose before profit.
If you want journalism to be sustainable and scalable while staying credible and independent, you don’t fix one part. You rebuild the whole system so the loop can run again, this time without PR, without activism as a business model, without dancing to the tune of an investor, or using brand reputation as a substitute for truth.
We need to start with filling the void left by the collapse of local and specialist media, which once originated many of the best stories.
Trust collapsed because people stopped judging reporting by process and started judging it by only choosing to hear what supported their view of how the world works, dismissing anything else as fake, and turning reputation into both weapon and currency.
Independence eroded as ring-fencing audience share became the real objective, making newsrooms slaves to money and algorithms rather than old-school editorial values.
At newsX, every story has 10 different specialists to take it from concept to publication, and another 10 stages to go from publication to monetisation. These roles are how we fixed the logjam in creating and publishing content, and there are similar logjams across the wider media sphere. Fix distribution by giving people what they want to hear and you can deepen the trust crisis. Rebuild trust by feeding people the truth and they will go elsewhere, deepening the financial crisis. Fix revenue with investors and you weaken independence. The pressure doesn’t disappear. It just moves.
Which brings us to the practical question: what does the newsX method actually do, and how does it solve these logjams?
First, newsX isn’t a single product you buy or a single site you visit. It is an ecosystem. Different people will enter it through different doors, depending on their role, their platform and the kind of journalism they do. What stays constant is the underlying design: a set of components that lock together to rebuild the loop and hardwire safeguards into how journalism is produced and published.
It starts with the newsX Press Card, the identity layer. It recognises that “journalist” is no longer only someone on a staff contract at a single outlet. It creates a professional status that can be earned, checked and relied on, with clear tiers, public profiles and accountability that follows the person, not just the platform.
The newsX QC project is the standards and enforcement layer. The name comes from the old Latin question, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who guards the guardians?” The answer, in this model, is: the guardians guard themselves, and newsX runs on a code of conduct enforced by journalists through a visible process. Crucially, that code separates bias in comment from bias in the presentation of facts, because the most damaging bias often hides inside reporting that is technically true. This is also where newsX Context First sits: a practical rule-set that targets the most corrosive failure mode of all, stories that are technically accurate but structurally misleading because of what is left out, or placed out of sequence, so readers are not pushed to a conclusion by omission, framing, or selective emphasis.
Then there is the newsX Storifyr, the production layer. Journalism is not just writing; it is workflow. Storifyr turns reporting into a repeatable chain from pitch to publication, with defined roles, checks, media handling, rights, distribution routes and usage tracking built in. It captures who did what, when and why, so provenance stops being a slogan and becomes part of the machinery.
The newsX Source Library is the evidence layer that offers an alternative to native advertising, a concept that BuzzFeed unleashed like a plague on the media landscape. In a world where screenshots vanish, context gets stripped and bad-faith actors thrive in the gaps, evidence is not a luxury. It is essential protection. The newsX Source Library preserves proof packs, primary material, key context and behind-the-story documentation, along with sources, contacts, supporting documents and the reporting trail. With it, stories can be defended, corrected or challenged on substance.
The newsX Proof of Work project is the value-and-accountability layer. It starts from a simple premise: journalism is a service provided, and the labour in that has value. It exists to make that value trackable and enforceable, so payment and credit attach to the work itself, not to whoever has the biggest megaphone or the most convenient narrative.
Each component solves a specific problem. The newsX Press Card answers the first question any reader should be able to ask: who is this? The newsX Storifyr hardwires standards into production, while newsX QC exists to put things right when they go wrong. The Source Library closes the gap between assertion and proof by preserving the evidential trail. And the newsX Proof of Work is how contributors get paid and credited in a way that strengthens credibility and improves access to better stories and stronger publication routes, so incentives support reporting rather than distort it.
Put together, that combination is the system. It is how newsX repairs the journalism chain. The next question is the one everyone asks as soon as they see something like this: how does it scale without selling its soul?
Most attempts to “save journalism” hit the same wall. The moment you scale, you get taken over. Scale attracts money, money buys influence, and influence reshapes coverage, sometimes loudly, usually quietly, until the newsroom is no longer free to follow a story wherever it leads.
At that point the organisation may still be large, but it is no longer journalism in the only sense that matters: the freedom to publish without fear or favour. NewsX starts from a different premise. Trust and independence are not soft values. They are engineering requirements.
As a registered Community Interest Company (CIC), newsX is designed around purpose rather than profit in the way a standard Ltd is. It’s run for the community, but each project remains independent and can follow its own vision. When a strategy works, the whole system benefits. When it fails, it doesn’t take down the entire network. And because it’s modular by design, it can grow without needing a central owner to control it.
That is another reason why newsX is modular. Verification, QC, workflow, proof packs, publication routes and value tracking can be duplicated across communities and contributors without becoming a franchised ideology or a personality cult. Each virtual newsroom remains independent. The only thing that scales centrally is the verification framework: a shared standard for provenance and accountability that protects journalism without dictating what it has to believe.
It also means the work inside those communities has to stand on its own. A story should not be valuable because the “right” person said it, or because a big brand ran it. It should be valuable because it has provenance: who produced it, what standard it met, and what proof exists. When the process is visible and comes from a real, verifiable person, the ecosystem does not need reputation to defend itself.
From there the economics can finally run in the right direction. The goal is a positive loop: credibility drives distribution, distribution drives revenue, revenue funds more reporting, and more reporting builds more credibility. But that loop only holds if credibility is real, and it only stays real if the system defends itself against the usual corruptions: hidden PR, pay-to-say editorial, audience pandering and investor pressure. The rule on the money side is the same as the rule on the editorial side: money can enter, but it cannot use the steering wheel.
That is why newsX is not designed around growth at any cost. We can grow at whatever rate we want because what we need is now in place. There may be bugs, things that can be done better, but change will always be part of the organic growth we want to foster.
As revenue grows, contributors can be rewarded through straightforward payments and/or internal credits that reflect proven contribution, not follower numbers and popularity, not ideology, and not access to capital. Value is earned through verified work inside the system, and the route from income to reward is visible and rule-based, not dependent on favour.
That same design protects the editorial core. There is no model in which money buys story selection or framing, so investors cannot purchase outcomes. And scale does not dilute standards, because standards are enforced at the point of production and publication, not retrofitted afterwards.
But the news business is conservative. New ideas can take years, even decades, to gain acceptance. To most people, newsX will look like a pointless exercise, like building a boat on a mountain miles from the sea. That too looks pointless right up until it isn’t, because if your name is Noah, it can be the only rational thing to do.
So newsX for me was never about finding a guaranteed win, and never a business pitch dressed up as a mission. It was, and is, a calling. When the BuzzFeed allegations stripped away my security and my reputation, they also forced clarity. I could see what had broken, and I could see a way to rebuild it.
There was no obligation to do it, and there is no obligation for anyone else to follow. That part is not in my hands. What is in my hands is the work. The system exists. It functions. It is ready to be used.
I’m reminded of a story about a schoolboy who got on a train with his father and spotted a brand-new camera left on the seat. The boy was thrilled with the “find”, but his father called over the conductor and handed it in. When the boy protested that it would probably never get back to its owner and they should have kept it, his father replied simply: “That’s not our problem.”
That is where I am now. I’ve built the boat, and I’ve handed in the camera. What happens next isn’t mine to control. That is now up to you.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Sign Up: https://pressx.club/
Build A Newsroom: https://storifyr.com/
Challenge Mistakes: https://mediawatch.report/
Follow me on X: https://x.com/mleidig2
