Sky News has launched its paywalled specialist defence app, its second paid content product to go live this year.

Defence Insider will contain reporting and analysis about defence and security not published elsewhere on Sky News, mostly as video but also in other formats.

It will also give paying subscribers ways to ask questions of Sky News journalists and experts, and other perks like early access to events.

The app, built on tech from Noosphere, costs £14.99 per month after a three-month free trial. Sky News separately has a free app for its general news offering.

It follows the launch in June of podcast bundle Sky News Insider, which costs £2.99 per month for ad-free listening, early access to new episodes and live show tickets, bonus episodes and a community forum. It currently includes three shows: political podcast Electoral Dysfunction, Trump 100 and Stuff Matters. More podcasts are set to be added to the subscription bundle in future.

Sky News has moved into paid content for the first time as part of its project to become a “premium video-first newsroom built for the digital future”, with less of a focus on live, breaking TV news, by 2030.

The aim is to build engagement and community around its journalism, reach new audiences, and develop new revenue streams.

Sky News executive editor and managing director Jonathan Levy said of the new defence app: “It’s about giving people more, and in greater depth, of what you’d get from Sky News,” he said. “So it’s a continuation and an extension of what we would ordinarily do.”

Although there will be content added daily, Levy said, “what it’s distinctly not is a kind of a defence and security Tiktok, so you’re not going to get a constant timeline of stuff.

“It’s a considered proposition. The journalism in it is thoughtful and useful and has depth and high production values.”

Why defence and security made sense as first genre-specific paywalled product at Sky News

Levy said defence and security made sense as one of the first forays into a subscription product for Sky News partly because “we have deep expertise in that area.

“We’ve always talked in ‘2030’ terms about building engagement and communities around our journalism, and in order to do that, I think you have to be offering something particularly good, particularly special.”

Levy cited defence and security editor Deborah Haynes and military analyst Michael Clarke, saying Sky News has “some of the best people to bring a proposition like this to life”.

The other reason, he said, is that it is “an incredibly topical subject”, citing the UK political debate around defence spending and the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“It’s such a vibrant area editorially. It’s an area of increased interest.”

Who will pay for it?

Levy said he expects the paying audience to be a mixture of experts and interested consumers, saying it is not a ‘Pro’ style product but that it is “designed to be more specialised than you’d get from a mainstream broad proposition news offering”.

The app was initially tested at the London Defence Conference in April, with attendees who largely work in the industry able to try it out for free.

Levy explained: “If you think about the people who are really looking for an extremely specialist version of a defence proposition, this won’t be it. We’re not competing here with Jane’s Defence.

“But people who work in the defence industry, having a greater sense of what’s going on than they would get from the general news, both on Sky News and elsewhere, this will be for them, so the more consumer end of the expert market.

“And then the more expert end of the consumer market at the same time: the people who would in no way call themselves experts or specialists, but are particularly interested in defence and security.”

Levy said Sky News will identify other news genres that could be somewhere they “can be particularly strong and provide something particularly deep” but that future launches are unlikely to look the same as the defence app. He added that no further paid launches are currently planned for this year.

The podcast bundle, which launched in June, has had an “encouraging” start according to Levy who said it was “slightly ahead” of expectations.

He added: “The biggest thing we’re learning from it, which is a new thing for a newsroom like ours which is adopting these types of products and propositions for the first time, is the different phases of it. You launch it; it’s gone well in that first launch phase. We’re encouraged by that. That’s good.

“How do you then do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing? And how do you you take a product like Podcast Insider and constantly iterate it and add things to it so you can not only keep the people that have already been signed up, but keep growing the number of people that are signed up at the same time? So that’s a different type of editorial innovation for us.”

‘What is new for us is going really narrow’

Under the 2030 project, and for this app in particular, Levy said, Sky News is working out how to provide a niche offering for the first time.

“What is new for us is going really narrow around a genre because… our heritage is a news organisation that did a lot of things. It was breadth. And we’re still in that game. So it’s about still being in that game, but then developing the muscle and the expertise and the ability to also super serve a particular kind of consumer in a much narrower, deeper way.”

Levy said this impacts “team organisation, the way that you structure your editorial processes, the way that that content sits, because we’re still doing defence and security in terms of our wider proposition [so] how do you establish the relationship between the broader proposition that’s free and will always remain free, and this narrower paid proposition?

“So they’re all things that, as a news organisation that’s going through this 2030 transformation, which is all about establishing new relationships with the audience, new revenue streams, this is a bit of a test case of how all those things work and will work.”

But, Levy said, despite the new products the “journalistic principles are the same as they always are…

“You’re still looking to tell people different things, new things. You’re looking to explain it to them well and clearly, and in new and innovative ways.”

Similarly, Levy said, “being an editor is still exactly the same: you’re setting the editorial values for the organisation, those values are informing the type of stories that you are likely to do as an organisation”.

He continued: “In our heritage as a broadcaster… you did that and you put it out and it was rewarded commercially through television advertising,” whereas now the focus is on direct relationships which means understanding the audience is much more important.

Sky News has recently appointed Dan Silver, formerly of The Telegraph, as director of audience strategy and engagement who is “building an audience team that’s going to allow us to understand much better what audiences want, how they want to receive news, how they want to consume it”, Levy said.

He added that “that type of conversation is new to a newsroom like ours”.

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