The Canary is a left-wing news website based in the United Kingdom. While focusing on UK political affairs, it also has a "Global" section, a satire section ("Off the Perch"), and "Science", "Environment", and "Health" sections. Founded in 2015 by Kerry-Anne Mendoza and her wife Nancy Mendoza, the website increased in popularity around the time of the 2017 United Kingdom general election. It was initially funded through a combination of advertising and a group of about 1,500 supporters, but by 2020 had moved to a largely reader-funded model.
In June 2022, it briefly became a worker cooperative after staff removed the management due to inequalities and mismanagement. According to Press Gazette, in July 2022, The Canary was the third most popular politics news website in the UK behind Politico and Politics Home. In 2025, it received investment from a northern Irish businessman, which it used to buy other websites and launch a print tabloid. In summer 2026 it reported that Lloyds Bank and Metro Bank had blocked it from accessing its bank accounts, and that it had suspended operations.
History According to editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza, The Canary was created in October 2015 with five founding members in an attempt to "diversify the media". The website was funded by advertising and monthly contributions from around 1,500 supporters in August 2016. It published 9,000 articles in its first two years. According to Mendoza, a major factor motivating The Canary founders was scepticism of the mainstream media, a scepticism that was shared by Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party. In his first address as Labour leader, he attacked pundits, arguing that they did not understanding the discontent among many ordinary British voters, and talked about the "power of social media". Following the 2017 United Kingdom general election, the BBC reported that websites "such as The Canary, The Skwawkbox, and Another Angry Voice are making a huge impact and earning a massive following" and such sites were considered to have contributed to sensationalist reporting of the election.
In April 2016, Mendoza said in Free & Fearless (a magazine produced by Hacked Off) that "we are attracting an audience of 3.5 million unique users per month. On top of this: every two hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – someone becomes a paid subscriber of The Canary. ... Our growing traffic is attracting advertisers who are now offering us a floor RPM (payment per 1,000 hits) of £3 and a ceiling of £9." According to The Canarys FAQ in 2019, around half of the website's revenue was raised from online advertising, and the other half from reader subscriptions.
During 2016–2018, the website had an editorial team of around 30, although only five of The Canary staff earned enough money to work full-time. It had an annual turnover of £250,000 in 2016. In August 2019, The Canary emailed users to announce that it would rely more on its team and less on freelance contributors due to a reduced income. After the email was shared online, Mendoza said on Twitter that by the middle of this August the website would "leave the gig economy". The Canary said this was due to Facebook and Google changing their algorithms, which reduced the site's traffic and therefore advertising income, and to the campaign to persuade advertisers to blacklist the site. It said it was "susceptible to pressure from political Zionists, and our advertising revenue is under fire." The Canary mounted a recruitment drive for one thousand additional subscribers, which it reported it had achieved by early August, saying this had secured its immediate future.
After the 2017 general election, The Canary was targeted by the group Labour Together (LT), which wanted to "defeat Corbynism" and prevent any future Labour leader from following Corbyn's policies. LT used social media to encourage businesses which advertised on The Canary to remove their support of the website. As a result, The Canary 's readership fell and it was forced to restructure the newsroom.
In September 2020, The Canary announced it would fund a new investigative unit staffed by two journalists for six months. In a statement, it said "A reader-funded investigative unit that is responsive to the requests and demands of The Canary readership is something people have asked us for since our inception. We believe this unit will be of value to our existing readers and attract new readers. We hope they will work with us to secure funding to continue the unit after the initial six months." Drew Rose, formerly director of operations, became editor-in-chief, replacing Bex Sumner. Rose said the site had survived the "decimation" of its advertising income and "politically-motivated attacks on our staff", and had shifted to a 95% reader-funded model. In July 2021, Mendoza stepped down as director and editor-at-large, handing over her shares in Canary Media Limited to colleagues. She was named as chief operating officer and Emily Apple as senior editor.
In October 2022 staff at the organisation announced that they had "overthrown" the site’s management and had been running the publisher as a co-operative since June of that year, after discovering evidence of "gross inequalities and gross mismanagement that was rampant in the company". That structure was later dissolved.
In 2025, businessman Cecil Hetherington, founder of the Northern Irish classified ad website Used Cars NI and chair of property website PropertyPal, became a director and major shareholder, donating around £2 million and owning up to 50% of the shares through his company Ulidia Investments. According to the left-wing Morning Star tabloid, The Canary announced itself as "the first UK newspaper Murdoch doesn’t own", which the Morning Star "amicably point[ed] out... isn’t true". At the this point, The Canary's director and chief executive was Steve Topple, who had joined the newspaper in early 2016.
In mid-2026 it had about 50 full-time and part-time staff, having expanded from ten after Hetherington's investments, according to Topple, with over half the staff part-time. In May 2026 it announced plans to launch a print tabloid with a circulation of 20,000 by the end of the month and 25,000 across England and Wales by early June. The paper's target audience would be older working class people. Topple described the forthcoming paper's style as "shouty" and "swears a bit": "There is a space for a truly left-wing progressive daily print newspaper that will...do what The Mirror and The Guardian, for example, should be doing, which is give positive front pages if Zach Polanski [sic] said something brilliant, openly discuss Israel’s ongoing genocide in West Asia and give a demographic of readers something they can’t come in to get.”
In June 2026, The Canary alleged that it was de-banked by Lloyds Bank, saying it was "left with barely any funds" and unable to pay staff. Lloyds Bank had not provided a reason and The Canary said there were other instances of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals being debanked. A number of staff were not paid again in August. In the wake of this, the print tabloid was suspended, two weeks after its launch.
The Canary announced on 4 September 2026 that it was suspending all operations after a second account was blocked by Metro Bank. The website also reported “uncertainty and frustration among some members of staff” that led to “serious internal misconduct by some staff and significant disruption within the organisation”. Hetherington quit as director the same week.
Political standpoint In its early years, The Canary was left-leaning and is frequently sceptical of the mainstream British press. In 2026, The National described The Canary as pro-Palestine and critical of mainstream media.
It was supportive of 2015-2019 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. In common with other left-wing alternative media in the United Kingdom, its stance towards the Labour leadership became more critical after Corbyn stepped down and Keir Starmer won the 2020 Labour Party leadership election.
Describing her website to Journalism.co.uk in 2015, Canary editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza said: "For us, this is ultimately about democracy. Informed consent in the public is the bedrock of democracy, and if that informed consent isn't there because people aren't aware of the kind of information that they need to be, they won't be equipped to make the decent democratic decisions that they need to, say, for example, on climate change, the justice system, or whether austerity is a positive economic policy." Mendoza stated it was "a complete coincidence" that the website was created shortly after Corbyn's leadership victory, and added: "We don't have any affiliations with political parties, we don't have any affiliations with political organisations, and we're not actually ostensibly left-wing." She called the site's editorial stance "a counterpoint to conservative media" and "broadly liberal". Mendoza also stated that The Canary was "biased in favour of social justice, equal rights – those are non-negotiable things. We're in this as an issue-driven organisation. ... Every press organisation has an editorial stance and we're certainly no different."
Regulation and accuracy In August 2017, The Canary joined the voluntary state-approved press regulator Impress. In its first year with the regulator, The Canary was the most complained about Impress member, but the regulator upheld just two of the 58 complaints they received during 2017–2018 about its news reporting. In April 2019, The Canary was given an overall pass rating and a pass on eight out of nine factors (it failed on "handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly") by NewsGuard, an organisation which evaluates news outlets for trustworthiness.
A 2018 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism described The Canary as "a left-wing partisan site" and an example of "alternative and partisan brands" which have "a political or ideological agenda and their user base tends to passionately share these views." Its trust rating was given as 4.69 where 10 is fully trusted, making it more trusted than the Daily Mail, BuzzFeed News, and The Sun but less than the Daily Mirror, the regional press, or any broadsheet newspaper, although its trust level among its own users was at 6.65 (a similar level to The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, and the regional press).
In response to criticism, Mendoza said: "We are human beings and we make mistakes. We clean up the mess and make sure it's clear to our readership." On 14 March 2019, The Canary said that it had produced 10,000 articles since its creation and two of its articles required deletion after editorial review, representing 0.02% of its content.
In 2020, The Jewish Chronicle''' reported that Canary journalist Steve Topple, who had also appeared on Russian state media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik International Radio, provided columns for PeaceData, a website created by Russia's Internet Research Agency to swing the 2020 US presidential election to Donald Trump. In one column he described Belarus's exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as “little more than a Western regime change puppet.”
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