Sky News has launched a subscription app dedicated to defence and security coverage, alongside polling suggesting nearly a third of Britons believe the United Kingdom is likely to face a military attack within the next decade, the broadcaster stated.
Sky News Defence Insider is priced at £14.99 a month, with a three-month free trial for new subscribers, and gives access to reporting and analysis from the broadcaster’s defence journalists including Defence and Security Editor Deborah Haynes and military analyst Michael Clarke.
The app is built around video, with subscribers able to put questions directly to journalists and experts through Q&A sessions and community discussions. It also carries frontline reporting, expert briefings, explainers, interviews with military leaders and decision-makers, and early access to live events.
In the interests of transparency, our editor in chief George Allison has joined the platform as a freelance security and defence journalist, contributing written and video defence and security journalism as part of the contributor team for Sky News Defence Insider.
The launch is accompanied by new polling conducted by Sky News with YouGov, which the broadcaster says reflects growing public anxiety about an increasingly insecure world. Nearly a third of Britons believe the country is likely to face a military attack within the next decade, according to that research, against a background of what Sky describes as growing debate about what the changing international landscape should mean for British security and defence priorities.
Deborah Haynes set out the case for the app in terms of how much has changed. “For decades, Britain enjoyed a level of relative peace and security that many of us took for granted,” she said. “Yet, with Russia’s war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and uncertainty about the extent of US military support to Europe in a crisis, understanding defence, security and wider national resilience has never been more important.”
The app, in her account, provides “an inside track as the UK and its European allies attempt to rearm to confront a more dangerous world”.
Jonathan Levy, Executive Editor and Managing Director of Sky News, said defence is an area where the broadcaster has real authority, expertise and distinctive journalism. “As public interest in national security continues to grow, Defence Insider gives audiences direct access to the reporting, analysis and expert voices that help explain an increasingly complex world.”
According to Sky News, the app builds on demand demonstrated by The Wargame, its podcast series which generated 3.6 million cross-platform listens, and forms part of a broader strategy running to 2030 aimed at building deeper relationships with audiences around specialist content and premium video journalism.
Defence Insider sits alongside the free Sky News app rather than replacing any of its existing coverage.
“attempt to rearm” is an interesting choice of words, since it implies that doing so is an endeavour that can somehow fail despite your best efforts. Surely you either allocate the funding and re-arm, or you don’t?
It sits behind a very heavy paywall. 135 GBP per annum.
One wonders how defence isn’t now considered mainstream news. I gave up my subscription of the Times as their defence reporting was pathetic. A Defence Editor with no experience of the subject matter, no interest in gaining any and little indication of ability. The days of journalists visiting operations and units are long gone. All they do is google and pop in a bit of AI research. I see how conspiracy theorists have a thing for ‘mainstream media’.
Then why are you on the UK Defence Journal?
I would assume he means mainstream news journalists, as the context was talking about the Times – as good as UKDJ is, it’s not read by the masses (yet). We know you chaps know your onions.
Did I see a George amongst the list of names on the App?
Well you can’t expect much from the worst profession…the one where most of its professionals did not went to work on the job description but to do activism.
We have to add the damage by journalists academic courses did to the profession of journalism. Specially hoe it already reinforces the cultural, political, social monoculture of journalists.
Since there are humans, there is war, but almost no media or journalist is interested in it, understands war. Royal Navy has only 5 operational frigates because of that, no pressure. No mainstream journalist was and is worried about it.
One of fundamental survival and prosperity factors is energy, but no journalist is interested in it either…
So half of it will be wrong then…
Excuse you?
Nearly a 3rd.. so that’s 30%… this means 70% don’t think this will happen..
As a manager of catastrophic life threatening risk I can tell you this is pretty much on par.. if the risk management professions are saying it’s possible but not that likely essential 95% of people will decide it’s not going to to happen.. if they say it’s really possible and we need to be concerned you will get up to 10% and if you come out and say this is now very likely present all the evidence of just why loads of people will die you will get about 30% who go blimey what are YOU going to do.. the other 70% will not believe it until they are dying on the floor.. or they walk past the stacked up bodies… many of them will try to deny it even when the bodies are stacking up if it does not directly affect them and those they love.
I might have a go at it, I’ve always eyed a Janes subscription but could never justify the cost. Obviously this won’t be a Janes equivalent but I highly respect a lot of the people listed, excluding Yalda Hakim.
I do wonder though, how will this affect the articles Allison writes for UKDJ, will he take a step back? I have noticed a lot fewer articles from him, or maybe that’s just my imagination.
Yeah looking at it I think I just hallucinated George writing fewer articles.
I do think Sky has done a reasonably decent job amongst the mainstream broadcasters on defence coverage, though I also consider that bar (especially from the Beeb, despite my otherwise positive opinion on that front) to be six feet underground. But, if it’s going to be a standalone subscription app, the content will need to be a great deal more in-depth (and have a closer finger-on-the-pulse!) than the usual “line graph of %GDP since Major” and “ISW map with commentary over the past week or two’s trends”. TWZ With British Characteristics shouldn’t be too much to expect for £15/mo, I’d hope!