 | |
Type of site | Political commentary |
|---|---|
| URL | novaramedia |
| Launched | 2011; 14 years ago (2011) |
| Current status | Active |
| YouTube information | |
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2012–present |
| Subscribers | 1.1 Million |
| Views | 378.1 million |
| Last updated: 4 October 2025 | |
Novara Media (often shortened toNovara)[1][2][3][4] is anindependent,[5]non-profit,[6]left-wing media organisation based in the United Kingdom.[2]
It was founded in 2011 by James Butler andAaron Bastani, who met in the same year during theprotests against the increase in UK university tuition fees. It was supportive ofJeremy Corbyn's Labour Party leadership for the latter half of the 2010s.
As of 2019, Novara Media is atrading name of Thousand Hands Ltd.[7] It has offices in London, and another office in Leeds.[6]
Novara was founded in June 2011 by James Butler andAaron Bastani. Butler was educated at theLondon Oratory School, followed byBrasenose College, Oxford from where he graduated with a degree in English. Bastani was educated atUniversity College London. Initially, Bastani and Butler hosted an hour-long live show andpodcast, called Novara FM, oncommunity radio stationResonance FM[8] as a kind of 'socialistnight school.'[9] The intention was to feed into the leftist movement that had resulted in the student protests.[9] They named the show after the Italian city,Novara, inElio Petri's 1971 filmThe Working Class Goes to Heaven.[2][9] The venture developed into Novara Media in 2013 with the involvement of others engaged indirect action in the student movement.[8] Novara diversified and, in addition to audio, written and video content were produced,[3][10] and Novara Media established itself as a multimedia project.[8]
At its inception, Novara Media's attitude towards theLabour Party "veered between sceptical and hostile – but certainly not hopeful".[8] The media outlet's affinities, however, were drawn towards the Labour Party by the interest generated byJeremy Corbyn's2015 bid to be the leader of the party—unlike many within Labour, Corbyn and his allies,John McDonnell andDiane Abbott, were seen by those at Novara to be allies of extra-parliamentary political movements on the left, like those in which Novara Media's team were involved.[8] Novara was supportive ofJeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party[2] and obtained a July 2015 interview with Jeremy Corbyn on the day he became thebookmakers' favourite to win the2015 Labour Party leadership election.[9] A number of other interviews with Corbyn and McDonnell followed.[8] Other guests on Novara includedLabour Party ChairmanIan Lavery, Shadow Home SecretaryDiane Abbott, theGreen Party MPCaroline Lucas, andChris Williamson.[9] Novara offered varied perspectives on the2016 EU membership referendum, with Bastani initially advocatingthe UK's withdrawal from the EU,[11] and James Butler advocating a pro-remain argument.[12] Novara later hosted multiple debates onBrexit-related issues from a left wing viewpoint.[13][14][15]
Following the Labour Party's better-than-expected result at the2017 general election, Novara Media, like other independent left-wing news organisations, received growing outside media interest.[2][9] In January 2018, Novara Media Ltd was dissolved byCompanies House after it failed to file an overdue confirmation statement that had been due in August 2017, though kept running.[16] An incident in 2018 which received particular attention was when Novara Media contributorAsh Sarkar said during a discussion onGood Morning Britain of protests against US PresidentDonald Trump's visit to the UK that she had also criticisedBarack Obama and theDemocratic Party because she was 'literally acommunist'.[17][18][19] This clip achieved more than 6 million views on Novara's YouTube channel, and members of their leadership team were invited on toNewsnight to discuss the incident.[20][21] It was also reported during 2018 that Novara staff regularly took briefings from the Labour Party viaWhatsApp.[22]
After the end ofCorbyn's leadership of Labour andKeir Starmer's victory in the2020 leadership contest, Novara, like various other left-wing media outlets in the UK, again took a far more critical view of the party's leadership.[23] Bastani himself resigned from the Labour Party in February 2021.[24][25]
Novara Media saw significant expansion during theCOVID-19 pandemic, with its YouTube channel seeing an increase in subscribers from 65,000 in March 2020 to 170,000 in October 2021, and in cumulative views from 10 million a month prior to the pandemic to 40 million by autumn 2021. Declan McDowell Naylor, a research associate at theCardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture, said in 2021 that of all the media organisations he examined that have been labelled "alt-left media", he believed that Novara Media had the greatest chance of surviving into the long-term. He said the organisation was attempting a balancing act, as "Everyone I interviewed there was talking about professionalisation and the tensions that brings with being a political project."[26]
Novara Media was the first to report of a leaked internal presentation given to the executive team ofAvanti West Coast and its managing director Andy Mellors, which had described government subsidies as "free money".[27] The report was raised by Labour MPAshley Dalton in theHouse of Commons, promptingDeputy Prime MinisterOliver Dowden to state that he would look into the matter. Avanti apologised for the incident.[28]
Novara has a left-wing editorial position. Bastani, one of the founders of the organisation, has frequently advocated the political idea of "fully automated luxury communism", "a political vision which advocates a transition topost-work society whereabundance isheld in common",[8] or as Bastani puts it, "the fullautomation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated".[29] Other contributors, notably James Butler, critiqued this idea on air, arguing that the word 'luxury' could lead to misunderstandings.Ash Sarkar has defined communism as being "about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun".[30]
Novara dissents from what it views as biased "mainstream media".[31] Its staff and editorial team believe traditional media outlets express a narrow view of politics and are out of touch with a segment of the UK public,[2] have missed a shift in the UK's political mood,[4] and has a corrupting influence on the UK's democracy.[32] In a 2017Guardian article,BBC Radio 4'sToday programme presenterNick Robinson said Novara Media, along with similar media organisations, were involved in a "guerrilla war" on theBBC and mainstream media as part of an attack on what they saw asthe establishment.[33] Sarkar responded that Robinson had incorrectly identified the reasons people were losing trust in mainstream media, stating that the "political classes"—including the "establishment political media"—had been trying for a number of years to assure the public that they (i.e., the political classes) were "still responsible custodians of power, which after a disastrousintervention in theMiddle East and afinancial calamity people aren't feeling any more".[34]
In September 2017, Novara was run by a core team of 15volunteers, and had about 200 paid contributing writers.[2] It has now grown to employ 25 staff as of 2024,[35] includingAsh Sarkar,[36] Dalia Gebrial,Shon Faye[37] and Rivkah Brown.[38]Michael Walker hosts Novara Live (previously TyskySour), the network's news and political live streams on itsYouTube channel.[39] The writers are external to the organisation.[8] All 25 staff in the organisation, as of 2024, are paid the same wage of £19 an hour, a £1 increase from its 2022 wages.[35][6]
In August 2025, Novara Media journalist Kieran Andrieu joined theGlobal Sumud Flotilla aboard the Spanish-flagged Adara vessel attempting to bring aid toGaza.[40] TheIDF intercepted the vessel at the beginning of October; Andrieu was detained, imprisoned in theNegev Desert and then deported.[41][42] OnDemocracy Now, Andrieu recounted numerous "torturous conditions" during this process, including a lack of clean drinking water and food and people's medications being thrown out.[43][44]
Along with other left-wing UK media outlets founded in the early 21st century, Novara Media's growth was in part due to a lack of trust, on the part of people in the UK who identify as left-wing, inmainstream media organisations.[2] Novara's readership is typically 18 to 30-year-olds[3] and left-leaning people dissatisfied with more traditionalnews outlets.[1][2]
A July 2015 interview withJeremy Corbyn on the day he became thebookmakers' favourite to win the2015 Labour Party leadership election attracted 60,000 views in its week of publication.[9] Novara's self-reportedsite traffic statistics for the period of the2015 UK general election were "modest": their electionliveblog attracting 5,500 readers and their most popular election-relatedarticle 3,700 readers. This increased during the2017 general election; the Novara website received a quarter of a millionhits, their videos on Facebook received 2.3 million views, and on the day of the election Novara reached 1.2 million people via Facebook.[8] By September 2017, the organisation'sYouTube videos were frequently gaining 100,000 views, and, according to its self-reported figures, it had reached 3 millionFacebook users over the 2017 election period.[2] Its YouTube watchtime on doubled in 2023, with its subscribers on the platform increasing by 300% to 666,000 and its Instagram followers tripling that year. As of 2024, its website receives about 500,000 monthly visits.[35]
Novara Media does not usepaywalls and is instead funded bydonations; in July 2022 it hit 10,000 monthly donors following a fundraising drive that May.[6] It was reported as approaching 15,000 monthly donors in January 2024.[35]
In 2015, theInstitute for Public Policy Research described Novara Media as "innovative" within a "narrowed ... media landscape" that needed further reform as part of the UK's "architecture of democracy" to ensure "that all voices are heard in the political system".[45]
Bastani attracted controversy in November 2018 for his position on the poppy appeal, an annual fundraising campaign run bythe Royal British Legion forveterans of theBritish armed forces. In an episode of Novara Mediapodcast "The Bastani Factor", Bastani described the poppy appeal as having a "racist" and "white supremacist" feel because, in his opinion, the appeal "has a kind of triumphalistmilitarism to it".[46] The comments attracted widespread criticism in the national media, including from the Labour Party'sShadow Defence Secretary,Nia Griffith, who suggested Bastani should be expelled from the Party.[47]
On 26 October 2021, Novara Media'sYouTube channel was terminated without explanation, and Novara called on YouTube to reinstate it. YouTube initially claimed that Novara had violated the platform's community standards without specifying the offences.[48] On 29 October, the social media platform reinstated Novara's channel and apologised, stating that they had made the "wrong call" after a member of the public incorrectly flagged the channel for spam.[49] In response, advocacy group Big Brother Watch, Chief executive Ed Proctor of theIndependent Monitor for the Press, and Novara contributor Ash Sarkar criticised YouTube for online censorship.[48][50] The columnistBrendan O'Neill opined that Novara Media "fell victim to thecancel culture the radical left fuels and too often supports".[51] Both O'Neill andJames Bloodworth of theNew Statesman wrote that in 2020, Gary McQuiggin, Novara's video editor, defended Twitter's right as a private company to remove accounts.[52]
In April 2024, Novara posted a video stating that one of the Labour Party's top donors was a supporter of the Israeli government and had profited from South Africa's apartheid rule. In September, Novara removed the video, stating that its claims were defamatory and that they had failed in their duties by publishing the clip. Novara disclosed they had made charitable donations to theWorld Central Kitchen organisation and theCommunity Security Trust in the donor's name.[53][54]