London-based features magazine The Fence is fundraising to expand its staff and increase its output of investigations and “stories that matter”.
The independently-owned title, which publishes its print magazine four times a year, is also planning to add a newsletter paywall and print advertorials in a bid to diversify revenues.
The Fence’s Fighting Fund has a target to raise £25,000 by the end of the year. It had almost reached £15,000 at the time of publication.
The money will be used to expand The Fence’s small team and fund more investigative content after editor Charlie Baker noticed what people want to read “has changed” since he last spoke to Press Gazette in 2022.
At the time he described The Fence as a print-first, advert-free magazine with “a lot” of “absolutely silly and absolutely small” content that still had “a sort of permanence”.
Speaking after the crowdfunder launched, Baker said: “More generally, in 2022 we had a big space to ourselves in the British mediascape as a young brand.
“People were more interested in sort of esoteric, playful stuff.
“And now, I think there’s a real hankering for hard news, or for stories that matter, and I really want to serve our audience by doubling down on our investigations and providing more.”
The Fighting Fund offers donors of £25 or more the chance to win one of 40 prizes – including “a night at Britain’s best restaurant [Osip in Bruton], lunch at Mountain [in Soho]… these are things that anyone would want to have”, said Baker.
While three years ago Baker said The Fence sees “the lowest return on investment” for investigations and fiction, this is no longer applicable to investigations.
“We’ve actually done well, like the investigation In The Shadow of St Paul’s by Tim Wyatt, that did incredibly well for us,” Baker said, adding it was one of their most popular pieces in 2025, alongside an anonymous report from a clinician working inside one of Britain’s asylum hotels.
“Journalists spending a long time trailing a story or people talking, doing hard-hitting dispatches, those have worked really well for us,” he said.
The magazine is aiming to still retain the “funny stuff and amusing features” that set it apart from competitors, such as Jim Waterson’s London Centric, which Baker described as a “really good” title “publishing stories that people really care about… they’re not sort of shaggy dog stories. He gives you the full scoop.”
The money raised will help The Fence add two part-time editorial staff, with one already hired and set to start in January.
The title’s team currently remains as it was three years ago, with four of whom Baker is the only full-time member.
“We need to have a few more youngsters running around, doing three days a week. That’s one way to expand,” he said.
Baker encouraged people to donate to the fundraiser “because the prizes are so good”.
“Even if you don’t win, it’s going towards a publication that’s been running for seven years. And so, we’re not going to waste any excess money. It’s going to go towards hiring excellent staff and brilliant, long investigative pieces.”
Print ads to make up 10% share of revenue
The Fence will roll out print adverts for the first time in 2026 with the aim of this making up 10% of total revenue.
Baker said they will be advertorial-style, bespoke, illustrated adverts for companies like London restaurants and fashion brands – “not Morgan Stanley”.
They will be created by art director Mathias Clottu in collaboration with the brands, with the aim of doing four to six adverts in four magazines a year.
The publisher currently only runs advertising on its two newsletters, Capital Letter (3,000 subscribers) and Off The Fence (29,000 subscribers).
Capital Letter is fortnightly and “will go weekly very early next year, and then go paywalled”, Baker said.
Baker said he “can’t see a way in which [ads] would generate enough revenue for it to be worth it” on the website, “whereas the magazine and the newsletter is slightly different”.
The Fence revenue up 20% in 2025
The Fence generates revenue from its own books, syndications in other titles, print sales and subscriptions.
Baker said the prize draw may recur “every three years or so as a way of just raising a bit more money”.
The Fence’s two published books are The Pub (self-described as “wit, wisdom and weirdness on Britain’s best-loved establishment”) and Shit Literary Siblings, on overlooked and forgotten siblings of literary greats.
But subscriptions are the “overwhelming” primary source of the magazine’s revenue.
“We’ve increased the revenue each year – this year, excusing the crowdfunder, we’ll be up 20% on what we did last year,” Baker said. “Growth continues to be buoyant.”
The magazine cover price is currently £7.99, having just increased from £7.50 (“Inflation,” said Baker).
A digital subscription costs £27.99 for the year, print-only is £31.99 and print and digital bundle £36.99.
“I feel like we’re providing a product, an excellent product, at an affordable sum,” said Baker. “It’s very important to me that the magazine is not expensive… I never want it to be seen as a luxury product.”
Although “total number of subscribers has increased by a good amount this year”, Baker said The Fence grapples with distribution challenges for EU subscribers (“it’s a lot harder to get magazines to them, like the Brexit customs orders”) and the increased expense of Royal Mail in the UK (“they’re interested in distributing items at a slightly higher cost”).
The way print distribution works makes it “hard for print to grow organically”, Baker said. “All your growth in print, ironically, comes digitally…it’s difficult getting in [to] the supermarkets.”
Nonetheless Baker was optimistic about the future in print: “There is a big audience for print, right?
“There’s an existing audience with people who grew up [where] print was the only product. And then Gen Z and Gen Alpha, there is real interest in it [from them].
“People used to queue for nightclubs. Now they’re queuing for baked potatoes, or for hoodies from Supreme… I feel like magazines should be a big part of this interest in tangible, physical goods, which is going on at the moment.”
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