Why would a young woman quit her pop career to work in an office... with her dad?
Especially when he began by admitting that he didn’t even know what an app was!
OF ALL the many thousands of lockdown career changes, it must count as one of the most surprising. Flora Connell seemed set for stardom with her band One Eleven. She’d supported Bryan Ferry, the Roxy Music legend at the Royal Albert Hall and was about to embark on a tour of America when Covid-19 struck. Yet today finds her back home in the Cotswolds feeding the chickens… and working for her father.
More surprising still, this dramatic change of heart has little to do with the virus.
Rather, while the world gets back to normal and concert venues open up, the 31-year-old has turned her back on showbusiness for a very different mission – an innovative news service designed to cut through the lies and contradictions of the internet.
Dismayed by the relentless fear-mongering of the net, Flora dreamed up The Knowledge with her father Jon Connell, the entrepreneur behind the hugely successful global magazine The Week.
And the result is a joint father-daughter site that offers everything you might need to know about current world events in bite-sized chunks, all delivered through a concise, light-hearted app plus a newsletter and a website.
Their mission is to entertain as well as educate. And to declare war on ‘doomscrolling’, the obsessive hunt for bad news that has fuelled so much of the web and social media in the past two years.
As Flora found during lockdown, the internet can be a hostile and confusing place, even for ‘digital natives’ – younger people who have grown up using computers and smartphones.
So with time on her hands, she started to think of a way to make sense of it all.
Promising ‘all the week’s wisdom in one place’, The Knowledge is ‘like having a GPS for the internet – a signpost telling you which way to go’, explains Flora.
‘The idea was to arm people with the information they need to join a conversation. It should give them something interesting and witty to say at a dinner party.’ Even the name is smart. The Knowledge, of course, is also the name of the training for London’s black cab drivers who must commit to memory the whole street plan of the city, and its famous landmarks.
NOW working in an office for the first time in her life, Flora says she has shelved plans to reunite with her band. ‘One minute I was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall and the next I was back home feeding the hens and sitting in front of the fire.
‘But in a way, starting The Knowledge is not too dissimilar to starting a band,’ she says. ‘When you first tell people you’re doing it, they all think you’re mad. It’s a risk.’
This all sounds very familiar to her father, Jon, the other driving force behind the project.
When he left his position as Deputy Editor at The Sunday Telegraph in 1995 to set up The Week, there were plenty of people lining up to tell him he was mad.
His critics included the Duke of Edinburgh, a family friend. (Jon had been a contemporary of Prince Charles at Gordonstoun).
‘Prince Philip had come up to my cousin’s estate in Scotland to compete in a carriage driving competition. When I told him of my plan, he said, “No, no, no. We need you at the Telegraph!”’
Fortunately for Jon, he ignored the Duke and pressed on, selling the family home in London to fund half the start-up costs. He went cap in hand to family and friends for the rest.
Before long, The Week caught the eye of publisher Felix Dennis who became a major financial backer and, with serious investment behind it, the magazine soon amassed loyal supporters from around the world. Of the 2,750 curious readers who subscribed to The Week in 1995, 700 were still signed up more than 20 years later. With its succinct summary of the past week’s news, it drew in more than 200,000 readers in the UK and nearly 600,000 in the US.
In August, Future, which owns Country Life, bought Dennis Publishing, which includes The Week, for £300million.
But Jon believes this new digital news service could even eclipse his past success.
‘I love The Week, but however much I like it, there is a gap in the digital market,’ he says. ‘Just 25 years ago, we were living in a sea of newspapers and the internet scarcely existed. Today, it’s a totally different world.’
At 69, he shows no intention of retiring or even slowing down as he bounds around his Cotswolds estate, pointing out things of interest. ‘There’s the lake where we would go swimming in the summer, that way is the old manor house…’
Jon and his wife Alexandra live in a renovated former laundry – now very much a country mansion – near the pretty village of Lacock.
The family of Flora’s mother – Lady Alexandra Moncreiffe Hay – has been linked to the area for generations. There is also a family association to colonial East Africa and the notorious Happy Valley set. Flora’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Josslyn Hay, shot dead in Kenya in what became known as the ‘White Mischief’ murder. Her great-grandmother was Lady Idina Sackville who became known as ‘the bolter’ for leaving her children behind to head to Africa.
(Lady Idina inspired the character of The Bolter in Nancy Mitford’s comic novel Love In A Cold Climate, who was played by Emily Mortimer in the recent BBC TV adaptation.)
As you might expect from such a family, the walls are full of goldframed paintings, family photographs and some mementoes of Jon’s time as a Washington correspondent for The Sunday Times, when he interviewed President Ronald Reagan.
The family home was full again for the first time in years during lockdown as Flora and her older
brother Ivar, Alexandra’s son from a previous relationship, returned home.
Flora is happy to needle her father, saying: ‘Dad was ready for lockdown for years before it happened because he has been stockpiling his whole life!
‘The cupboards are full of bags of Scottish oats and enough Marmite to last a decade.’
But the result of many hours of lockdown walks and debating was
Some things about working in an office make me want to rip my clothes off and run down the road
The Knowledge – a project now funded by DMG media group, which also publishes The Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail.
‘I told him it had to be Daily not Weekly and it had to have an app,’ explains Flora. ‘He didn’t even know what an app was.’
‘I do now,’ he interjects, brandishing his mobile. ‘I’ve got more on my phone than you now!’
Flora, too, is having to adjust. A desk job alongside her father is quite a change from the music industry.
One of her earlier roles, for example, was working in a studio for the artist Prince – which entailed ensuring his personal ping-pong table was always ready.
‘I heard a banging noise at the back of the studio one day and it was Prince knocking on the door with his cane,’ she recalls. ‘He’d managed to get himself locked out in his purple cravat by the bins.
‘I think I’m good at adapting and changing so this makes sense. There are parts of working in an office that I adore and other parts that make me want to rip my clothes off and run off down the road.’
Jon says: ‘We take what we do seriously. There’s an intellectual rigour there. But we don’t take ourselves seriously and that’s the key.’
In the past few days, the app has seen a mixture of pithy stories and punchy opinion pieces.
It has covered everything from the moment that President Joe Biden was caught napping at COP26 (‘Is “sleepy Joe” too woke?’) – to a succinct summary of the Government’s U-turn on the former Cabinet minister Owen Paterson and a piece about Professor Kathleen Stock, who was hounded out of Sussex University by trans activists. Like any self-respecting current affairs magazine, it also carries sport, property and money sections.
There’s a ‘From the archives’ section, too, recalling earlier interviews with people back in the news today.
THEN there is the ‘heroes and villains’ segment. Last week, the heroes included ‘hungry baleen whales’, which have been found to eat three times as much as previously thought – the equivalent of 80,000 Big Macs a day in krill – and in doing so trap and lock away vast amounts of carbon.
And the villains? The standout was Jayne Rivera, a fitness model and social-media influencer who pulled sultry yoga poses in front of her dead father’s coffin. Her social-media posts have since been deleted.
‘The internet is such a confusing place,’ says Flora. ‘We can learn about anything we want in a flash, but it can destroy people’s lives. We’ve created a world within a world.
‘Everybody needs help navigating their way through it, otherwise it’s exhausting. What we’re doing is searching in all the dark corners to direct people to the Crown Jewels.’
As Jon puts it: ‘One of my former colleagues in magazines said to me: there’s so much to read out there, you can never finish it. But at the end of our five-minute newsletter it says, “That’s it. You’re done.”
‘And people tell me that’s what they love – the feeling that they have accomplished something.’