Zelo Street’s Tim Fenton: ‘Once you start getting in with the press, you have to conform’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/08/zelo-street-tim-fenton-blogging-twitter

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While some know Crewe as the home of Bentley car manufacturing, for many more the town is the railway junction that they pass through on their way to somewhere else. It is also the home town of Tim Fenton – a 60-year-old blogger who has made it his mission to take on the might of the rightwing press “from the Crewe end of the telescope”.

Fenton, a former IT consultant with a quiet Yorkshire voice, is an unlikely campaigner for media plurality in the UK. The son of a teacher and a pilot from Leeds, who spent most of his working life travelling the country as an information systems analyst, Fenton started blogging six years ago this month, around the time that his work contracts dried up and the phone-hacking scandal kicked off. The blog began life as a hobby that he didn’t take particularly seriously. Fenton says he doesn’t really know why he started it, but does admit to having been inspired by other people’s poor blogging efforts. “I thought I can do that and I can do it better,” he recalls.

The result was Zelo Street, a name based on a personal in-joke that Fenton won’t share, where he observes the media and political elite from the front room of his three-bedroom terraced house. The blog has gained a reputation for its forensic coverage of the phone-hacking inquiry and a methodical approach to spotting contradictions and apparent instances of hypocrisy in the mainstream media.

His readership is small – the blog had 100,000 page views for the first time in the month of January – and largely made up of media professionals, but along with others such as Bellingcat (founded by Eliot Higgins who blogs from Leicester), Fothom (written by Peter Jukes, who live-tweeted the phone-hacking trials), Tim Ireland (who writes Bloggerheads) and Press Gang (run by Paddy French), he is one of a group of bloggers – usually white and male – who are considered a vital resource by media accountability campaigners.

Not all will agree with Fenton’s views or even appreciate his writing style, but he is nothing if not dedicated. Last week he wrote more than 15 blogs. Nearly all involved his favourite topics – Rebekah Brooks, the Murdochs, rightwing blogger Guido Fawkes and Boris Johnson.

Evan Harris, associate director of the campaign group Hacked Off, says people like Fenton are “a fine resource”. “The press don’t cover [issues of media regulation and phone hacking] so they have a special place.” He describes them as valuable “fact checkers” who, for whatever reason, have the time and inclination to monitor what the press are doing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people out there investigating offences who are reading their blogs,” Harris adds.

Fenton does not describe himself as a journalist and says he never will. Real journalists are “the foot soldiers of all the newspapers and broadcasters” who have been trained with a trade, he says. “People who come along with blogs and say ‘I’m an online journalist’, well, I think that devalues the word journalist.

“When the phone-hacking business came up [in 2009], I immediately figured out that there was something significant there,” he says. “There was a lot of protest that was a little bit too loud coming from the papers and their supporters and hangers-on. That’s always a bit of a giveaway.”

He speaks slowly and carefully as if nervous of getting something wrong. “2009 was not actually a good time to start a blog,” he points out. “It’s a crowded market now. There are loads and loads of people doing blogs. But when I started it was already getting crowded. The people who’ve really made hay as a result of starting blogs, started well before me. They rather caught the wave.”

Those people include Paul Staines, who started the influential Guido Fawkes blog in 2004 – and so also recently celebrated an anniversary, his tenth. Fenton is an active member of the anti-Guido club and spends almost as much time writing about Staines’s blog as he does about some of the tabloid papers accused of hacking.

When the Sunday Mirror splashed its controversial story that Conservative MP Brooks Newmark had sent semi-naked photographs of himself to a reporter posing as a young female Tory party activist called Sophie Wittams, Fenton was one of the first to suggest that Guido Fawkes journalist Alex Wickham was the anonymous reporter behind the scoop. He refuses to claim it as his exclusive, saying it’s impossible to say who reached the conclusion first.

Fenton says he first noticed that Wickham and other members of the Guido team tweeted the story before the Mirror journalists who were bylined on the piece, and – when the story was condemned by sections of the press as a “fishing expedition” – Wickham defended the story a little bit too much.

His Twitter campaign against members of the rightwing media has been described by critics as trolling. “I don’t knowingly go out to troll anybody,” he says. “It’s one of those accusations that people make when they want to badmouth you.” And Fenton’s targets certainly give as good as they get.

In 2011, Fenton joined Sunny Hundal, the blogger behind Liberal Conspiracy, to seek out high-profile Twitter users who appeared to have fake followers – including prospective Conservative candidate Mark Clarke, Nigel Farage’s senior adviser (then managing editor of the website Breit­bart) Raheem Kassam, and Tory party chairman Grant Shapps.

This made him enemies. Fenton claims that he went to bed one day with about 1,000 Twitter followers and woke up the next morning with 19,500. “I knew that people could buy their own fake Twitter followers, but I didn’t know you could also buy them for other people.” He says he’s now pretty sure that all of his 5,500-odd current followers are real.

Fenton partly attributes the Guido Fawkes blog’s success to the fact that it says what the rightwing British press wants to hear. Even now, he says, a blog won’t become really popular until newspapers start paying attention to it. “Guido Fawkes is in a better position than people like me because the mainstream media will be listening,” he says. He accuses Staines of selling out by having a Sun on Sunday column.

“The problem is that once you start getting in with the press, then you have to conform,” he adds. “If you’ve got a column in a Murdoch paper then you’re not going to call out the Murdoch press because you know what side you’re bread’s buttered.”

Fenton is, however, always careful not to suggest that Zelo Street is in the same league as Guido Fawkes (the blog’s founder Paul Staines claims that the site gets between 120,000 and 250,000 visitors a day): “I’m not going to pretend I get anything like the traffic the Fawkes blog gets,” he says. “I don’t regard myself as crucial or vital, I’m just somebody sitting in the stands. I’m not on the field of play, I’m just observing.”

Fenton seems to view himself and his fellow leftwing political bloggers scattered across the country as a fifth estate – a term he doesn’t reject – holding both politicians and the media to account. He argues that keeping themselves removed from the mainstream media is of the utmost importance.

“Independent-minded bloggers are totally different from the press,” he says. “As soon as you get in with the press you’re compromised.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 60

Education: ‘Three very ordinary A-levels’; BA systems analysis, Huddersfield Polytechnic

Career: 2004 Freelance systems management specialist 2009 Started Zelo Street blog