UK Magazine The Fence Celebrates Fifth Anniversary, Seeks Investors for Further Growth

By: Kari McMahon

The “UK’s only magazine,” The Fence, is celebrating its fifth anniversary and looking to a future of growth with new revenue streams and new investors—for a print publication.

The quarterly 64-page magazine is irreverent and playful, brought to life with distinctive black and orange sketch illustrations. Articles range from heavy pieces, such as an investigation into the legacy of fraud and suicide in the Church of England, to the frivolous, like an examination of the UK’s Autumn budget through the eyes of naked revellers at London’s sex clubs, and everything in between.

“I feel the great advantage we have is there are thousands of people who don’t just like it, they love it. My challenge over the next 12 months is finding thousands more people who would love The Fence but haven’t come across it yet,” Charlie Baker, founder of The Fence and the one staff member, told AMO.

Satire is having a renaissance in print. In the United States, satirical outlet The Onion brought back its print newspaper as a monthly offering to its subscribers, who pay $5 a month. The advantage of print is that it enables playfulness to be embedded throughout the magazine through illustrations, Baker said, which isn’t as easy to do online.

“I never planned for it to be a satirical magazine, people put us in that category,” Baker said. “I just thought of it as a magazine and I think a magazine should mirror a great conversation you might have in the pub or at dinner where you’re with a great group of people and a conversation ranges from the silly to the serious seamlessly.”

Diagrammatic elements, like “The Fleet Street Kids” height chart (see embed) included in this quarter’s issue, would be hard to put into a content management system (CMS), Baker said.

“It’s hard to use text and image humorously concurrently online,” he said, adding that it would cost thousands to build a CMS that can replicate the print experience online. You can nonetheless read the magazine’s digital version.

Finding Centrist Dads in Barnstaple

The magazine’s print circulation is 6,000 with readers across the political spectrum. An annual print and digital subscription costs £34.99. In comparison, Private Eye, also a satirical publication, had an average circulation of 235,449 per issue in 2023, according to Press Gazette. It charges £90 a year for 26 issues a year.

The most common trait among The Fence’s readers is that they are people who like magazines and high-quality writing, Baker said. Although it is primarily considered to be a print product, it has reached most of its current audience through generating buzz online.

“People don’t browse for magazines with the same lackadaisical energy they did 20, 30 years ago,” Baker said.

The challenge for The Fence is now tapping into an audience who love magazines but won’t stumble upon it via social media or its free newsletter, which is distributed to 25,000 people.

“I’m very interested in the middle-aged centrist dads living in Barnstaple or Yorkshire who grew up with Viz and NME and love magazines,” Baker said. “There’s a huge amount of people who would love the magazine and I need to reach them in a cost-effective way.”

The Challenges of Print

Distribution is one of the most challenging and costly parts of managing the print product. The Fence has a distribution partnership with newsagent retailer WHSmith, which has over 1,700 stores, but expanding to other national stockists has proved difficult because of the set up costs associated with it, Baker said.

The current issue — which on a newsstand costs £7.50 ($9.49) — costs £20,000 ($25,295) to make. A quarter of the costs went towards journalism, another quarter towards art direction, a fifth on printing and the remaining 30% was distribution.

The Fence isn’t yet profitable. So far, Baker’s childhood friend Will Pelham, a 33-year-old architect and the second son of the Earl of Yarborough, has financed it.

“I’ve worked very hard for almost five and a half years and he’s put a fair load of money in,” Baker said. “We want to make something that ultimately gives us a return on investment.”

Pelham, who is a co-director alongside Baker, helps out in the office on the business side once a week, most recently overseeing The Fence’s new website, but is not involved editorially. “If we didn’t have the new website to pay for, we’d have been quite close to breaking even,” Baker said. “I feel like we could be in profit in about 18 months.”

Slow and Steady Wins the Race?

Newsletters play a key role in Baker’s plans for reaching profitability. He’s building out a number of different revenue streams in addition to print and digital subscriptions. Total revenue is up 92% on last calendar year, Baker said.

The magazine will still remain the flagship, and they are rolling out two new paid newsletters. Advertising will also be introduced across the newsletters — the magazine itself is proudly ad-free. These revenue streams are fairly low cost to introduce, Baker said.

“About a year ago, nearly all the money we made was from subscriptions and we get bits of money here for articles being syndicated,” Baker said. “But now we’ve got these other revenue streams opening up, which is great.”

And coming next year is The Pub by The Fence, a gift book published by Penguin. The plan is to release gift books every 18 months or so, Baker said. This will be in addition to The Fence’s existing range of merchandise, which includes artwork, totebags and back issues. Also on the roadmap are ticketed events to be introduced around 2026, he said. Plus, there’s the recent signing with Hollywood agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), with some of The Fence’s articles in the process of being optioned.

Even with all of these revenue streams opening up, Baker is planning to raise funds from investors at the start of next year to spend on marketing, expanding the newsletters and hiring an editorial assistant. It won’t be “a particularly large amount of money,” Baker said, and only with investors who understand the reality of investing in media.

“At the end of 2026, I’d like to have 10,000 print subscribers,” Baker said, up from the 6,000 today.

“We are not delusional about growth possibilities nor are we delusional about how much money we should have, nor do we want to pump and dump it to a private equity company,” he said. “I think all these things are in our favor and we just keep growing it slowly and sensibly.”