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Sam Baker and Lauren Laverne
Sam Baker, left, and Lauren Laverne are to launch The Pool, an online platform with content aimed at a female audience. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
Sam Baker, left, and Lauren Laverne are to launch The Pool, an online platform with content aimed at a female audience. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

Lauren Laverne launches online platform aimed at women

This article is more than 9 years old

BBC 6 Music presenter teams up with former Cosmopolitan editor Sam Baker to create The Pool, featuring content from a wide range of well-known journalists

6 Music presenter Lauren Laverne and former Cosmopolitan and Red magazine editor Sam Baker are launching a new online platform featuring writing, audio and video aimed at women.

The pair have signed up a string of well-known journalists and writers to contribute to the new site called The Pool, which will go live before Easter.

Journalist and broadcaster Sasha Wilkins and MasterChef winner and Guardian weekend columnist Thomasina Miers, who founded the Wahaca restaurant chain, will be writing food blogs for the site.

Guardian Weekend beauty columnist Sali Hughes will provide op-ed pieces, while Times and Evening Standard writer Laura Craik will be writing a weekly fashion column.

Comedian and writer Viv Groskop will be recording an agony aunt podcast.

The Pool’s tablet edition. Photograph: The Pool

Between them, The Pool’s core contributors have around half a million followers on Twitter, which will be used to promote the site.

The Pool will operate on what Laverne describes as a “broadcast” model inspired by the success radio has had in remaining part of people’s daily habits, despite the rise of the internet.

“Radio is always the audience of one, where are they, what are they doing. You start with them and work back,” said Laverne.

“A lot of digital media doesn’t do that and a lot of traditional media certainly doesn’t do that. It’s that old fashioned thing of I’m here declaiming what the news is or what this kind of fashion content is, rather than thinking about that person and starting with them.”

Initially, the site will have roughly 20 pieces of content a day, delivered over around seven or eight “drops” tailored to what the audience is doing.

All content will be labelled with how long it will take to consume, and users will be able to search based on how long they have. It also offers a scrapbook function for people to save articles for reading later.

Baker said: “Whenever we talk to people, big internet users, people who are on their phones all the time, they felt completely overwhelmed with content, and if you look at how most people are delivering content, they are just producing huge amounts and hoping things will stick, and the quality of that is not always great.

“We want to take a converse view and say ‘what’s the content she wants, where is she and how do we put that into her life?’”

The Pool is being funded by early stage investors Fourteen17 and aims to be profitable next year.

The Pool’s homepage on a desktop computer. Photograph: The Pool

It is using native ads to generate revenues, with one brand partner signed up to an annual tenancy and more in the pipeline.

Baker said: “We drew up a list of companies in our fantasy list, and we are still working on the A-list, because everybody we went to said yes. We are building bespoke packages of content.

“We can’t just do a blog and an email. What’s interesting for me is where you sell display and the other stuff gets thrown in as an extra, the way we’re approaching this is only the people who are doing brand deals get display.”

Laverne and Baker came up with the idea for The Pool two years ago over coffee.

“Sam was working at Red and she took me on as a columnist there, and we became friends,” said Laverne. “When she left, we went for a cup of coffee and initially we started kicking around the idea of doing something small and bloggy, and it grew and grew.”

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