Peter Geoghegan (centre left) and Lucas Amin (centre right) pick up the Specialist Journalism prize for Democracy for Sale at the British Journalism Awards 2025. Picture: Press Gazette/Adam Duke Photography
Investigative journalism outlet Democracy for Sale has more than tripled revenue and subscribers in the past 12 months, according to founder Peter Geoghegan.
The Substack-based newsletter won the Specialist Journalism prize at the British Journalism Awards in December for reports on foreign and “dark” money being funnelled into UK politics.
Democracy for Sale is staffed by three former Open Democracy journalists: ex-chief executive and editor-in-chief Geoghegan, Lucas Amin and Jenna Corderoy.
Geoghegan told Press Gazette said he hopes to increase the proportion of revenue coming from readers and not be overly reliant on philanthropic support which Geoghegan said “allows us to do work we would struggle to do otherwise” but can prove unstable. “What we’re looking to get to is sustainability.”
Democracy for Sale is not paywalled but, like The Guardian, asks for reader support to keep it free for all. It has almost 50,000 subscribers and nearly 1,500 paying readers.
Geoghegan said: “I always believed that people will pay for quality content, quality investigative journalism, and especially campaigning journalism wanting to change how the world works.”
Peter Geoghegan: News paywalls create ‘democratic problem’
Geoghegan co-founded Scottish investigative co-operative outlet The Ferret in 2015 which he said offered a small number of free stories per month before asking people to pay.
“At the time very few people were paywalling anything so it was kind of an experiment in when everybody else is zigging, zagging,” he said.
However, paywalls are “everywhere now” and Geoghegan feels it has become a “democratic problem”.
Speaking at Press Gazette’s London office in January, he said: “On my phone, I have access to better information than probably any other time in history. I’ve got the FT’s app on my phone, I’ve got The Guardian, The Times, I’ve got The New York Times. This is a humongous amount of quality content. But if you look outside: almost none of these people will have that. Go to a regional town and it’s even less.”
Geoghegan therefore wanted Democracy for Sale’s stories to be free for all. “I want everyone to read the stories. I think that’s really important.”
He said aving supporters rather than subscribers allows them to have “a slightly different appeal to people. It’s not saying to people ‘you give us X amount of money, you get Y amount of stories’. It’s saying ‘you give us money and we will continue to do this work that we all think is important’…
“There is an element of values, and it’s an element of caring about the issues that we care about. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people support us and they might not want to read every story, but they want us to exist.”
Geoghegan noted that “the journey to sustainability should be different for different people but for a small outlet like us, part of that sustainable journey is building a community around us to care about what we do”.
For new outlets the “barrier to entry is a lot lower than it was” compared to when Geoghegan set up The Ferret, he said. “I think it does allow for smaller specialist outlets to step in.”
He praised other small operations like US tech outlet 404 Media, formed by ex-Vice journalists in 2023, and ex-Guardian media editor Jim Waterson’s London Centric, which was shortlisted for four British Journalism Awards including Innovation of the Year.
“What unites, I think, all of those is highly engaged audiences, very clear subject matter and… commitment into what values look like in the world and what the kinds of journalism you want to see in the world is,” Geoghegan said.
Guardian praise helped early Democracy for Sale growth
Geoghegan left Open Democracy in mid-2023 and set up the Substack newsletter, named after his 2020 book, to “keep writing” and hold onto his audience in a world where X (formerly Twitter) was ending its run as the main hub for journalist contacts and conversations.
Initially it was “bubbling along in the background” while he was working part-time at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
But in September 2023 it was included in a Guardian list of 33 of the best Substack newsletters – as the first entry under the ‘Politics, News & History’ subheading – in September 2023 .
The Guardian described Geoghegan as “the person to read if you want to know all about dark money and its corrosive effect on British politics. Stories so far cover Liz Truss’s Growth Commission and the rule breaking of an English cricket legend.”
Democracy for Sale homepage on Substack on 15 January 2026
Subscribers grew from the hundreds to the thousands and Geoghegan said this gave him “the impetus to keep going with it” and eventually leave the OCCRP to focus on the newsletter full time.
Democracy for Sale publishes around two stories a week and, Geoghegan said, every piece achieves more than 30,000 views on Subtack. In total the outlet’s stories were viewed more than three million times in 2025, he said.
He said “successful newsletters are quite clear about what they do” and said this is made easier by being such a small team. This means less time in morning meetings debating “is this a story for us?” as they ask instead: “Does this story hit the bar?”
Geoghegan said writing for newsletters feels “almost like the early days of blogging, but in a slightly more immediate way. It’s all about how do you connect with your audience?”
The newsletter format also means Geoghegan has “never had better tips,” he said, citing how easy it is for people to press reply on an email.
He described how he evolved to fit the format, after starting by writing in the traditional inverted pyramid news story structure.
“Over time, I started playing around with that format… What we do is tell original journalism, but there’s a way of telling that story that engages people… and helping people to connect with why the story they’re reading about here matters.”
The newsletter publishing cadence took some work. Geoghegan said he initially felt “huge pressure to publish all the time” but that now: “I feel like people don’t want to hear from us more than twice a week… As journalists, you tend to publish more [than people might want]. That’s one of the biggest challenges, frankly, is being your own editor… [and] not pressing publish.”
Democracy for Sale also publishes background information about how a story was done and also regularly publishes source documents.
Geoghegan said: “We’re driven by a commitment to public interest journalism, a commitment to transparency, a commitment to accountability in public life.”
Legal threats ‘one of the biggest challenges’
Geoghegan described legal threast as a “kind of a constant, unfortunately” and “one of the biggest challenges, especially for small journalism outlets”.
The British Journalism Awards judges noted that Democracy for Sale was “brave” to write the stories it did despite its “limited resources”.
Democracy for Sale stories are given legal checks by former longtime Guardian director of editorial legal services Gill Phillips, now co-author of journalism law bible McNae’s .
Geoghegan noted that a High Court case which “can easily cost £3m”, carries the risk of bankrupting a small outlet, and that this has a “chilling effect” by scaring journalists off stories that matter.
Geoghegan urged the Government to deliver promised but delayed legislation to tackle strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPPs) “in a way that genuinely protects journalists”.
Transparency in public life ‘side project’
About half of the philanthropic funding Democracy for Sale receives goes towards its journalism, while the other half supports its work with lawyers to fight legal cases against government secrecy.
Cases are taken both on behalf of Democracy for Sale and for other requesters of information who they “matchmake” with legal support. They won four information tribunal cases last year with others “in the pipeline”.
Geoghegan said he originally thought Democracy for Sale would be “an FoI project with a journalism side project. But actually now, two years later, we’re a journalism project with an FoI side project.”
He explained: “FOI is very broken, but one of the most effective ways of making it work is for public authorities to know that if they end up with a tribunal, they’re going to end up against someone bloody good, and just rebalancing the scales of justice.”
During Geoghegan’s time at Open Democracy the title won a legal victory against FoI “blacklists”, flagging requests from journalists, at the Cabinet Office. The work won Campaign of the Year at the British Journalism Awards 2022 .
Geoghegan seeks to widen audience reach in 2026
In December Democracy for Sale published the results of a collaboration carried out with political campaign group Led By Donkeys and broadcast on ITV News, which saw an undercover reporter investigate “cash for access” in Westminster by posing as an advisor to a rich Chinese family office interested in investing in the UK.
It is currently working with Netherlands-based non-profit Lighthouse Reports to look into the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change as part of investigations into the influence of big tech on government
In 2026, Geoghegan wants to reach a wider audience4 and “get other people to care about issues we care about” and is working with campaign platform 38 Degrees on a petition to “Stop foreign interference in British politics”.
Geoghegan is also expanding Democracy for Sale’s Youtube presence (the channel currently has 5,000 subscribers).
He hosts discussions of its journalism with its biggest recent videos including one about an undercover Westminster “cash for access” investigation which got 79,000 views , and an interview with historian Andrew Lownie about the Prince Andrew “files” being shielded from the public (38,000 views).
Geoghegan said: “Newsletters are great, but they are still words on the page. A lot of people are consuming content in other ways…
“When I started off doing this, I was telling the kind of stories that I would have written as a freelance as page leads to a paper. I think we’re now at the space where we’re able to tell actually big, proper investigative stories. That’s been really heartening. I’ve really enjoyed that journey.
“On a personal level, I’ve never enjoyed anything I’ve ever done so much. It’s really fun. It gets me up in the morning.”
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