Amid great concern over the provision of local news in the UK and beyond, could organisations such as the Manchester Mill and the Bristol Cable challenge famous old papers in some of Britain’s biggest cities and calm long-term fears of areas becoming “news deserts”?
Alan and Lionel hear from Joshi Herrmann and Sophie Atkinson from Manchester Mill about whether their community subscriber model is the way to fund commercially sustainable journalism capable of holding powerful people and institutions to account in local and regional “patches”.
There’s also an update on “Gibb gate”, comment on the latest limp Ofcom ruling pertaining to GB News and analysis of Tucker Carlson flying to Moscow to interview the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity:
Alan Rusbridger:
Hello and welcome to Media Confidential, Prospect Magazine’s weekly analysis of what’s really happening in the media’s newsrooms and boardrooms. I’m Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber:
And I’m Lionel Barber. On this episode, the New Model for community media that’s challenging famous old newspapers in some of Britain’s biggest cities.
Alan:
Amid concerns about the future of local news, good organisations like Manchester Mill and Bristol Cable, calm fears of areas becoming news deserts and fund commercially sustainable journalism capable of holding powerful institutions to account.
Lionel:
Listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode and follow us on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Alan:
Lionel, you’re all dressed up in a suit and tie today. I imagine you’ve been having breakfast with a mole or a deep throat.
Lionel:
You have to wear a tie these days in the Woolsey if you’re meeting-
Alan:
The Woolsey. No.
Lionel:
If you’re going to see a deep throat-ish and impress them and make it seem like you are in the mix, wear a tie and a suit.
Alan:
That’s a useful tip. Well, I am not wearing a tie.
Lionel:
So I see.
Alan:
And I haven’t met a mole today, but I have been, there’s a judgement come out today in Ofcom GB News, our old friends, and they have cleared the Scottish conspiracy theorist, presenter, Neil Oliver, who claimed that COVID vaccines could cause something called turbo cancer. You and I may not be familiar with the...
Lionel:
Well, I didn’t do a medical degree, but on the other hand, that does seem fairly arcane.
Alan:
Well, I’m going to shock you by telling you that there is no such thing as turbo cancer, and it’s certainly not caused by COVID. But Ofcom said this was just a personal opinion and he should be allowed to say it. That’s the regulatory framework that we now live in, that you can spread misinformation and as long as it’s a personal opinion, Ofcom won’t worry too much.
Lionel:
Which is interesting given Emily Maitlis was absolutely carpeted for offering her personal opinion on the famous excursions of Dominic Cummings up north during COVID, and she was a presenter.
Alan:
Yeah. It seems to be one rule for GB News and one rule for everybody else. There have been outbursts of astonishment on Twitter at this ruling from pretty serious people who have worked in broadcast media and media, academics really saying, “What’s the point of Ofcom with judgments like this?” But that’s a question that we’ve been asking for some time.
Lionel:
We have indeed. And it seems to me that whoever debated this ruling didn’t understand the difference between an expression of opinion and what a presenter’s role is, which is something slightly different on a matter of fact.
Alan:
Yeah. Anyway, don’t get me going.
Lionel:
No, I won’t.
Alan:
And the other thing that happened this week is that the Commissioner for Public Appointments, so William Shawcross has declined to look into what we call Gibb Gate on the rather narrow grounds that the people who attempted to fix the chair of Ofcom, were not employees of the Department of Cultural Media Sport, and therefore, they can’t investigate. Again, you slightly wonder what the point of a public appointments commissioner is if they can’t look into something that clearly went wrong with a public appointment. But I’m obviously a very naive person.
Lionel:
Well, you can’t win them all, Alan. Shall I talk about a potential winner in American media?
Alan:
Go on, go on then.
Lionel:
Here we are. Well, Tucker Carlson has landed an interview with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and it’s airing, I believe very shortly. And I’m not jealous. I mean, I was with Henry Foy, my colleague in Moscow, the last Western journalist to sit down with Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2019.
But there’s some big questions about this particular interview because Carlson has already given us a flavour of saying, “Well, you’re not being told the truth. I’ll find the truth out the other side of the story by sitting down with President Putin.” If you look at the way the war’s being covered, Zelenskyy is being marketed as a consumer brand. This is the other side of the story.
And I think the problem is that there was no mention of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who’s locked up in Moscow on trumped-up charges of spying. That’s the Wall Street Journal correspondent. Well, I’ll wait to see how it plays out. He claims it’s not being edited. Ours wasn’t in the FT back in 2019, but a lot of questions about it.
Alan:
And it’s being streamed on Twitter as I understand.
Lionel:
Yes. Mr. Carlson or Tucker, as he’s known to friends, said Elon Musk had given him a signal that the interview would be broadcast unfiltered on X.
Alan:
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with wanting an interview with Putin. I think Carlson said something which was just plain wrong, that nobody else could be bothered to ask for an interview as though this was a gigantic scope. And lots of Moscow correspondents and foreign correspondents.
Lionel:
[inaudible 00:06:05].
Alan:
Yeah, they said, “Well, come on, we’ve been trying.” There’s nothing wrong. I suppose the thing that makes you anxious is that Carlson’s view of journalism while working at Fox News was more akin to propaganda than journalism. Isn’t that the problem?
Lionel:
It is. I mean he cast himself as a journalist reporter, but he’s not. He’s a partisan figure. He’s very much anti-war. He’s been a great fan of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat, and he’s a sympathiser. That’s a very different perspective than one of open-minded reporter.
Alan:
And from Putin’s point of view, this is pure gold, isn’t it, in the election year?
Lionel:
Well, coming up to the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Exactly.
Alan:
And he’s desperate to speak to the American right who are likely to get a bit wobbly over the support for Ukraine.
Lionel:
Well, they already are. As you know, the aid package, the military aid package in Washington is being held up by the MAGA Republicans. It’s a small group, but one that holds the balance in Congress. And this is vital military assistance. Yes, I’m afraid, Carlson, let’s wait to see how the interview goes. But he risks handing...
Alan:
Yeah, risks.
Lionel:
A propaganda coup to Putin at a critical moment.
Alan:
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Lionel:
Alan, you and I both started off on local newspapers. I was on the Scotsman and you were-
Alan:
I was on the Cambridge Evening News.
Lionel:
Indeed. We do have some roots, and a lot has happened in local news since the late 1870s... I’m sorry, 1970s when you and I were Cub reporters. I mean, it’s really been all downhill, hasn’t it?
Alan:
Yeah. I mean sometimes people use the word decimation wrongly, but this is almost literally decimation of the media landscape. I looked up the Manchester Evening News, which I think used to sell a quarter of a million copies in a city of Greater Manchester, something like 2.7 million people.
I looked at, their print circulation is now 7,000. Now they’ve got a big website, 11 million, but I’m sure we’ll come on to talk about what kind of website it is. It’s owned by Reach. But generally the prognosis for local news has not been great. And this phrase, news deserts, which grew up in America, defined as a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to any sort of credible and comprehensive news, the sort that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.
You’ve got communities that are now completely uninformed about what’s going on. People have got no way of knowing, except through places like Facebook. And what we’re exploring today is whether there’s a new grass and roots movement that is going to succeed in turning the tide.
Lionel:
Yeah. And I think what really matters here is if nobody’s covering the councils, nobody’s covering planning decisions, nobody’s covering properly the criminal justice system, the courts, cases, this is not just about damaging the notion of an informed citizenry. It’s also means that there’s no kind of community emotion, community spirit.
I mean, I think I’ll have a word about what’s happening in America because you referenced that. There was a very good book by Len Downie and Bob Kaiser, two of the top journalists at the Washington Post called the News About the News, which really forecast... This written about 10 years ago. Actually more recently, and Len Downie had an article in the Washington Post on this, there’ve been signs of a comeback with nonprofit news organisations, foundations, philanthropic organisations giving money and seeding a new generation of online websites to replace those big two town newspapers that were in a very strong position 40, 50 years ago.
Alan:
Great newspaper in Texas.
Lionel:
Texas Tribune.
Alan:
Texas Tribune, which is completely philanthropically founded. Last time I looked, it was employing something like 70 journalists. And they just do the kind of stuff that I’m sure you used to do on the Scotsman and I certainly did in Cambridge. Which as you say, was about anything that involved taxpayers money was held accountable. And you might think that’s a dry subject, but it’s proved tremendously successful in Texas.
Lionel:
Of course, in America you do have tax breaks for charitable giving. We don’t have a similar system like that in the UK. It’s never really come off, has it?
Alan:
We should talk about that at some point. I know that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism did try and register as a charity and from what I remember the last time they were turned down. But I think it may be about time that some kind of tax breaks are given to local news. It seems to be a fundamental part of democracy.
Lionel:
I’ll second that.
Alan:
Our guest today, are Joshi Herrmann, the founder and editor of Mill Media Company, and Sophie Atkinson, a senior editor at the Manchester Mill. Probably we should begin by asking you to explain what it is.
Joshi Herrmann:
Yeah, I started The Mill three and a half years ago. And it is a local publication covering Manchester. And the idea was to do in depth, thoughtful writing and journalism about Greater Manchester, trying to reimagine what local journalism looks like and feels like, funded by subscriptions and memberships rather than by online advertising.
And since then, we have grown the team. Sophie’s our senior editor. We’ve grown the team to Sheffield. We’ve now got a outlet in Liverpool called The Post. We’ve got one in Birmingham, which we launched recently. We are taking this format, this way of doing journalism, which is delivered via newsletters. Which really puts a focus on original journalism rather than rewriting press releases. Which really puts a focus on quality rather than quantity, I suppose. We’ve taken that model to other places and we are trying to bring a new kind of energy to local news, which as both of you know, has been in an awful lot of trouble in recent years.
Lionel:
Let’s stay with the business model for a moment. It’s important that you say you are not reliant on digital advertising. You went for subscription. Just tease that out. Why?
Joshi:
I think that the problem with online advertising it is that it creates the wrong incentives for journalism. It’s antithetical to local journalism in particular. And that is because online ads effectively incentivise media companies to get as many eyeballs as possible. If you get 10 million, 20 million, 100 million, you make more money.
That doesn’t really work for local journalism, which isn’t really supposed to be about pumping out volumes of stories to get tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people. It’s supposed to be about serving a relatively finite group of people very, very well. And what the online ad model has forced people to do, and if you look at some of the big local news publishers in the UK, you can see this very clearly if you go on their websites, it has forced them to go for volume rather than quality.
You now have the bizarre spectacle of young journalists in the UK who get their first job in local journalism. Instead of being sent out to work on a story and to go and interview people or go to court, they have to write 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, I’ve seen instances of 15 stories per day. You’re talking about real churning.
And that is because of the internal logic of online ads. If you go for memberships, if you get people to pay, we ask them to pay £7 a month or £70 a year, you get much higher revenue per user and therefore, you can serve those users. And the incentives work because they are paying for quality journalism. And we will only get more of them, and we will only retain them if we deliver quality journalism. Whereas in the other model, it really is about volume. It really is about scale, which I just don’t think it fits with journalism at all, let alone local journalism.
Lionel:
We’ve heard about the business model. Sophie, I want you to talk a little bit about content because that also is critical to the brand. And the choices of what you cover and how you cover it, especially given you don’t have a lot of reporters. Tell us a bit more about that.
Sophie Atkinson:
I think in the same way that The Mill has a relatively unique business model for local journalism, I think in terms of editorial, we’re also fairly unique in terms of British media in that we mainly do long form journalism.
I mean, obviously that is part of our format. If you’re only sending people four articles a week, you want it to be worth their money. But I feel like, yeah, long form journalism is something that’s traditionally in recent years, American magazines have been better at than us. And we are effectively trying to apply that same lens of American magazine style journalism to local news, which I’m not sure is something that’s ever been done before.
Alan:
Give us some idea of your resources because you’re tiny, aren’t you?
Sophie:
Yes, we are run by a skeleton crew. We are fundamentally a startup. On each paper, apart from currently Birmingham, we have two writers. Birmingham has one writer. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to reveal the news. Am I? Yes, we’re about to hire for Birmingham. If there’s any long form enthusiasts out there living in the Midlands, the West Midlands, we’d love to hear from you.
And then me and Joshi edit across all four papers. But yeah, it means that we’ve got obviously local people reporting on issues in Liverpool, in Birmingham, but with me and Joshi having a bit of editorial input.
Alan:
We were talking just before we came on about the idea of the local newspaper that Lionel and I started on. Obviously in the 19th century, it was very different then. But there was this idea that you were there to cover the courts, you were there to sit on the local health board, to keep an eye on the police, anything involving public money, you were there to monitor. You are not that are you? You can’t be that idea of local news. You are very, very selective.
Sophie:
Exactly. Yeah, we can’t cover everything. And I think we deliver a more curated version of that.
Joshi:
Alan, I’ve read your book. I think you write about being on the Cambridge News or newspaper in Cambridge, and those were the days when local newspapers had dozens and dozens of staff. And I don’t think our objective is to recreate that because the internet has, as we know, destroyed the business model for local news. And it also means that a lot of the information that used to be in newspapers is now freely available in other places.
Okay. The police have a Facebook page where they do all their press releases, et cetera. The local football schools are publicised online. You don’t need to check in the newspaper how to go to the cinema. The old bundle of local news has been taken apart by the internet.
We don’t believe in rebuilding the whole bundle, but we do believe that there’s a particular thing that’s lacking in these communities, which is nuanced professional analysis, which is great writing, which is the stuff that takes a little bit more skill and training. And so we are trying to bring that back rather than saying, “How do we reproduce everything that used to be in a print newspaper?”
Lionel:
It’s a little counterintuitive though, isn’t it, to talk about long form, because if you think of Politico, Semafor, these new news forms in the States or even some of the digital journalism here in this country, it’s bite-sized information. You’re not only doing long form, are you? I mean, I’ve looked at what’s being covered and I see some interesting stories not that long, for example, about who would want to be an MP in Rochdale.
Joshi:
Yeah, that’s right. I think that the thing we’re best known for is our longer stories, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 words. But around that we have Monday news briefings that give you a bit more of a sense of lots of things that are going on linking to lots of other publishers.
A big thing for us is we link to The Guardian when there’s the great thing about Manchester, we link to the FT, we link to the local newspapers. There’s a certain amount of curation going on as well. And I think people don’t just want a long form thing in their inbox. But I think if you ask people what are we best known for, it would be these deeper dives. Whether they’re like a lovely piece of cultural writing that Sophie or one of the team has done or whether it’s a more newsy investigation.
And I think that is something that really is missing in the UK media landscape. There really is a lack of people diving into a topic and spending a week or two weeks working on it rather than a day or two.
Lionel:
Sophie.
Sophie:
And especially that at a local level. Me and my colleague, Jack, last summer we worked on a piece about Miami Crispy, which is this chicken shop in Manchester. And there are these chicken shop wars. One person has this special sauce, everyone’s trying to figure out what it is. Obviously it’s so much fun to report and stuff like that. And when would you get the chance to do that at a national?
Lionel:
Who’s your competition?
Sophie:
I suppose technically you would argue our competition is the huge media companies that run local newspapers. Like Reach plc, in Manchester you’ve got the Manchester Evening News, in Liverpool you’ve got Liverpool Echo. But in terms of the stuff we put out, it’s so radically different to their articles that I would be surprised if they think of us as the competition or we think of them.
Alan:
If you were to critique the Manchester Evening News, what would your critique be?
Sophie:
I don’t think they respect their writers. I think there’s plenty of really talented writers working on the Manchester Evening News. I don’t think they’re given the time and space to do the work that they’re capable of.
Alan:
Joshi.
Joshi:
I think that’s the biggest thing is that their business model has forced them to get people to do a volume of stories that doesn’t produce quality. I think another criticism would be, I think they’ve taken their readers for granted. I think they’ve assumed that they will always be the big monopoly newspaper in Manchester. Same with the Liverpool Echo in Liverpool, same with the Birmingham Mail, et cetera.
And therefore that they don’t need to make the websites usable and they don’t need to have a balance of stories. And I think what happens when newspapers take people for granted like that and assume they’ll just have to read them so that people get really, really disenchanted. And that’s something, I mean, you just see an awful lot of disenchantment with these local newspapers because of with the user experience, because of the stories, et cetera.
Alan:
But I am just interested in whether... You are tiny, you’re doing a different job, but the Manchester Evening News, which is still a reasonable sized paper with a very popular website, are they sitting in council meetings? Are they sitting in courts? Or has that now gone?
Joshi:
Increasingly, the sitting in council meetings is not done on the salaries of the Manchester Evening News. It’s done by local democracy reporters who are funded by all of us. They pay our licences.
Alan:
Just explain what a local democracy reporter.
Joshi:
Yeah. There is a scheme whereby some of our licence fee doesn’t go to the BBC. It goes, it funds reporters who go to local council meetings up and down the country. They are embedded with the Manchester Evening News or the Liverpool Echo or a big local newspaper. Their bylines might appear to be an MEN byline or a Liverpool Echo byline, but in fact, they’re funded by us.
What’s actually happened is a lot of these newspaper groups have withdrawn resources from this kind of political reporting, this local accountability reporting because that gap is now being filled by the local democracy reporting service. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, that’s how it works.
Alan:
Do you think it’s a good thing?
Joshi:
I think that the scheme offers a really valuable service, but I also think it has acted as a subsidy for these very large companies that cut hundreds of jobs every year and effectively have replaced some of them even though they weren’t supposed to. They’ve replaced some of the people they laid off with this publicly funded service. I don’t think that we as licence fee payers should be paying a direct subsidy to these very large companies to make them look better while they are cutting so many jobs. I mean Reach plc, which is the biggest company in this space that owns lots of-
Alan:
Which owns the Manchester Evening News.
Joshi:
Owns the Manchester Evening News, owns the Liverpool Echo, owns the Daily Express, owns the Daily Mirror, they cut about 850 jobs last year. And that followed a year when they had cut more jobs. We’re talking about absolutely enormous layoffs in local journalism. Should our licenced fee be subsidising those companies? I’m increasingly sceptical that it should.
Lionel:
We haven’t talked about opinion and the role that that can play in building the brand. I always thought when I was editing the FT that, in an area of mediocre fragmentation that the quality of your commentary was absolutely critical, but I don’t see any real commentators on the site. Is that because you are short of dosh or you don’t see it as central?
Joshi:
Look, I think Sophie will have something interesting to say on this because Sophie has written some slightly more opinionated essays for us that have done incredibly well and which might indicate, Lionel, that you are correct and that I’m wrong. But my initial instinct when I started this company was that, in the national media at least, it feels like the balance of news versus opinion has got a skew in favour of opinion.
And that too much of what you see on national newspaper websites is opinion. And that that opinion is often written in such a way that it’s trying to anger people, get their hackles up, make them share things online. And I think that that has actually damaged the reputation of national news brands. And I think when we look at these questions of why do people trust news less, I think going too big on opinion is a big part of it.
25 years ago, the opinion pages were, what, two pages, three pages, maybe five columns. Now these news brands are pumping out 25, 30 opinion pieces a day. I don’t think that’s been great. But then sometimes I see Sophie’s cultural essays that are actually quite opinionated about Manchester and they do really, really well. And I think actually, our readers would like a bit more opinion. I’m willing to pivot.
Lionel:
You’ve heard about that phrase, “I’d love to be dictator for the day.” Let me be editor for the day and say to you, Joshi, that you’re taking too narrow a view of opinion. And the model is actually Mike Royko, the great Chicago columnist who was just writing about community life. And it was obviously his view of things, but it wasn’t the kind of shrill opinion that you are talking about. Sophie, come in and help me here.
Sophie:
I mean, I would push back very slightly. I wasn’t at work on Monday, so I’m going to ask Joshi for the specifics, but we had a great piece on the Sheffield paper. What was it specifically about? It was about these guidelines that the council had put out. And how many comments were there under it? About 80 comments or something insane. And that was effectively like a mini op-ed about the way that these guidelines had failed Sheffield. It wasn’t shrill, it was the sort of opinion you’re talking about. Yeah.
Lionel:
Case proven.
Sophie:
But I think, yeah, we do put out opinion. I unfortunately have never seen a play I’ve not had an opinion about. Obviously that’s slightly different. Cultural writing, you’re meant to have an opinion. But this Thursday we’re putting out something about the neighbourhood in South Manchester of Levenshulme and about the cultural segregation there. Which again sounds a bit more like what you’re talking about, not necessarily a shrill op-ed, but I guess my theories on why different demographics there have become a bit segregated.
Lionel:
Yeah, it’s about a voice. But Alan.
Alan:
Joshi, I mean, you’re trying to grow. Are you making money at the moment? Are you breaking even?
Joshi:
Yeah, so we got to a point last year where the company was breaking even. The Mill, our first publication was making enough profit to cover the costs of The Post, which was our third one in Liverpool, which is still burning a little bit of money. They were cross-subsidising each other and the whole company was breaking even.
Then we raised a bit of money from around seed investors, angels, people who are backing us financially. And that now means that we can invest a little bit more. This month we won’t break even because we’ve just launched a new publication in Birmingham, and that’s a little bit of a cost drag. But we basically, when we launch a title in a city, we want to get it to the point where you have a minimum viable team of two reporters and that within 18 months it’s paying for itself.
And then we want to get to a point where it can pay for a third person and a fourth person, et cetera. But we have a model which is very much get each city to a sustainable point so that that can be there for the long term. And so that when people are getting involved in it as readers, they know it’s not going to close tomorrow because it’s run out of money.
Alan:
Do you think of what you’re doing as a kind of public service? And do you think that in an ideal world, instead of subsidising local democracy reporters on Reach, you would like some form of subsidy or some kind of tax break to encourage what you’re doing?
Joshi:
I actually, I mean it would be hard to turn down money, but I think that we need to get journalism on a commercial footing. I don’t think having the state or private organisations giving donations or grants to an organisation like this would actually help us.
In the short term it would help us and we’d be delighted with the money and we’d hire all sorts of people. I think in the long term, if journalism in this country generally is going to be robust, if it’s going to do its job, it needs to see itself both as a public service and also as a commercial proposition that can create something that people are willing to pay for, whether that’s a contribution or whether that’s a membership or as a subscription, that people are willing to fund. And I think the nice thing about starting an organisation like this without any major public funding or any grants or anything, is it forces you to create something that people really want.
Sophie and I, in the early months, and Sophie got me on very early on, we had to work out what kind of stories grew The Mill, what kind of stories would get us 10 extra paying members that day, and which kind of things were actually boring people. And it forces you not to be boring, it forces you to be interesting. Yeah.
Alan:
Can I push back a bit on that? Because as we all know, sometimes the most valuable investigative journalism is boring. I mean, it doesn’t go boom in the middle of the night. But I’m really, I suppose what I’m trying to get at is the ideal size because both Lionel and I admire so much what you are doing.
But if you’re going to have a real impact on a huge city like Manchester, you can’t do it with two people. I mean, I don’t know what the ideal size is, whether it’s 20 people or whether it’s 50 people, but it has to be of a completely different scale. And I suppose that the sceptics would say it’s going to take a long, long time to get there unless you have some kind of break.
Joshi:
I think that on the investigative journalism front, we have found generally speaking that the stories that we put the most investigative resources into are the ones that perform the best because we present them in an interesting way and an exciting way. We don’t just splurge out facts for 10,000 words. We really try and tell a story.
I mean, I’m thinking of great investigations that both of your newspapers used to publish. They were often very exciting, interesting things that got a lot of public attention. We find the same. When we put loads of time into a big homelessness investigation in Manchester, which takes four different people an amount of time that got us loads of new subscribers. It’s very rare actually that the things that are high efforts turn out to be low reward. We are finding that the return on investment on that kind of work is good.
I think that your question about the size is really interesting. The trend in local journalism is that local newspapers are shedding staff year on year. Inevitably, if we are going to provide a real public service, we are going to have to grow year on year to fill those gaps and to take up the mantle of local journalism in lots of communities.
I don’t know if the ideal size is 20 people in Manchester or if it’s 40. I know that we’ve got 2,700 subscribers on The Mill at the moment in Manchester. We’ve got 6,000 paying subscribers across our four titles. I know that we can get that to 10,000 to 20,000 to 40,000 because you can see the level of enthusiasm that we’re receiving.
I take your point. Along the way, we may need little injections of investment to get there, but I’m very confident that there’s a lot of demand for this kind of journalism and that we can have a lot more people working in these cities in future than we have now.
Lionel:
This is Media Confidential and coming up, more on whether a new media model could secure the future of local news.
Alan:
In this week’s Prospect podcast deputy editor, Ellen Halliday is joined by independent journalist, writer and filmmaker, Simona Foltyn, to discuss the role of Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis as the tension continues to rise in the Middle East.
Simona Foltyn:
The big question here is to what extent Iran is directing these groups. And I don’t think that’s something that’s very well understood. There is no doubt that Iran has helped create these groups, that it has helped train them, that it has helped arm them, especially in the beginning. This is also the case with Lebanese Hezbollah.
But if we look at, for example, the Iraqi groups, Iraq is a very rich country. It is one of the biggest oil exporters in the world. And groups like Qatar Hezbollah have used their military power to commandeer a significant part of the economy. And I’ve spoken with Qatar Hezbollah officials in the past who have told me that they no longer need Iranian support. And I think that there’s a very good chance that this is true, that in fact the financial flow might be going the other way around from Iraq to Iran, especially since the country has been under sanctions.
But of course there is very much an ideological alignment. They see eye to eye with Tehran. They have the same outlook on the region, they have the same outlook on the west. But whether Iran is giving their orders here, I have a doubt about that. I think these actors very much act on also their individual domestic interest. And sometimes they align and sometimes they don’t.
Alan:
To hear more of that interview, follow and subscribe to Prospect podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Lionel:
This is Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber. And today’s episode is all about the future of local news. And whether a commercial model, like that of Manchester Mill, which provides community news behind a paywall, could be the way to ensure there are reporters and titles able to hold powerful people to account on local and regional patches around the country.
Alan:
Today we’re here with Joshi Hermann, the founder and editor of Mill Media Company, and Sophie Atkinson, a senior editor at the Manchester Mill.
Lionel:
I’m interested in this question of scale because you’ve clearly going to other cities. How does that fit into the overall strategy? Is it going to be all about The Mill? Is that the right brand for areas beyond the old textile industry, so to speak?
Joshi:
every city we go to, we create a new title, a new brand, a new team. And as Sophie will explain, the different titles have a different feeling to them. Our title in Sheffield has a different feeling to our title in Birmingham. Our one in Birmingham is called the Dispatch. Our one in Sheffield is called the Tribune. They are different. They have the same overall editorial principles, but they are different in what they publish.
And I don’t believe in taking one brand to loads of cities. I think that you need people in a local place to feel like they have their own title that’s going to be there for the long term, that cares about their priorities, that is built for them. That’s what we’re really trying to achieve. Sophie, does that ring true to you?
Sophie:
Yeah, completely. I would say that the place slightly dictates both the tonality and the focus of the papers. for example, in Liverpool, we’ve got our most politicised audience. I’d say when you publish a big investigation and you link to these pretty dry council documents, you’ve got 80 pages to read or whatever, you’ve got people in the comments who have read every single page and are going to really engage with the journalists on minutiae.
Similarly, in Sheffield, it’s entirely different. It’s much more focused on nature, on environmental activism. And yeah, Birmingham so far I’m still finding my feet there as an editor, so I couldn’t tell you. But so far our experience has been that every paper has its own character.
Lionel:
I get it that each newspaper has got a different name, but there is something called The Mill company that owns them. And is that an important part of the scaling of the brand?
Joshi:
I think that’s important in terms of attracting staff in particular. I think the readers will be attracted to these local brands, but in terms of us getting really high quality journalists. We now get messages from people in Glasgow or people in Leeds or people in Edinburgh who say, “We’d love to do something like you’re doing. Would you ever expand to our city?”
We went to Birmingham because Kate Knowles was working at the local paper and she wanted to do this kind of journalism. She got in touch. And after we’d raised our fundraising, we were able to launch there. I think having a kind of company brand that people are aware of, Mill Media Code, they see it a bit on Twitter, I think that helps us for hiring and for attracting journalists. I think the local brands are the public facing bit, and that’s what the readers really believe in.
Lionel:
One extra question here on strategy. Do you see The Mill company floating on say the unlisted stock market in five years, which would obviously give you extra capital?
Joshi:
I don’t think we are going to be doing that, Lionel. I think that we may need to raise a bit more money as we go along if we need it, but I doubt we’ll be listening to be honest. I think that it’s quite important that anyone who has an ownership stake in a business like this really believes in it. They have a motive that is to do with improving the journalistic output of this country, improving the local democratic reporting that’s done as well as having a financial interest.
And that’s why I think we’ll always be very selective about who we have investing with us. One of our recent investors was Sir Mark Thompson, who obviously used to be at the BBC and the New York Times. Professor Diane Coyle at Cambridge University. These are people who really care about the media, and that’s the kind of financial backers I think we’ll generally have.
Lionel:
But Joshi, I mean given that the Gulf investors and Redbird are not going to get the Telegraph, I mean they may have a ready outlet here.
Joshi:
We’re not available right now.
Lionel:
Don’t be too shy.
Joshi:
We’re not available to the Gulf, we’re not available to Jeff Zucker, any of these characters.
Alan:
Can I ask about the audience? I think, Joshi, I’ve seen you talk about the importance of creating communities. I don’t know if creating is the right word or hosting communities. But where does the audience come in in the creation of what you are doing? How important is that?
Joshi:
Yeah, I think Sophie can probably comment in on this as well, because a lot of our really great stories actually come from our readers. I think a huge amount of what media companies should be doing is hosting community conversations that are driven by their journalism. A good day for us in the office will be, if we see there are 30 or 40 comments underneath our story. And they’re not acrimonious comments, they’re people really constructively engaging. We sometimes get incredibly long and interesting comments.
I think that’s key because I think what’s happened over the past 20 years is media companies, as they’ve gone for scale, as they’ve needed to go for scale, we need 100 million, 200 million readers, they have severed their old relationships with their readers. And I think we are very, very much about those relationships. Which is a commercial concern, but it’s also, I think that media companies should feel close to their readers. They should represent them. And Soph, I mean we got, what, about 50 or 60% of our original story tips probably come from our readers now?
Sophie:
Yeah, absolutely.
Joshi:
Yeah, that’s it’s a big part of our journalistic process too.
Alan:
Some people might say, “Here are two young people making waves, creating a revolutionary,” it’s almost a movement, isn’t it? And yet the techniques seem rather old-fashioned, long bits of text. Have you had any other techniques up your sleeve that are new?
Lionel:
Like data?
Sophie:
Like data? Oh, we definitely have data. We have a great data journalist who’s part of the team, Daniel Timms. We definitely do data deep dives on all four of the papers. I know Joshi wants to go into video. Personally, I’m very happy to stick with long portions of text, but obviously there’s a benefit to doing audio, video, data stuff.
Alan:
I mean, are you a attracting an older readership or are you getting younger readers as well?
Joshi:
It’s a huge mix. The people who listen to our weekly podcast, the Manchester Weekly from The Mill, they tend to be 20s, 30s. The people on our free email list, so about half of our journalism goes out to everyone for free. That’s our public service journalism. They will tend to be 30s, 40s, 50s.
I think the people who pay a monthly subscription will generally tend to be, it’s an even split between people who’ve retired and people who are still working. They’ll be 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. And there’s a nice mix of ages in there. But obviously when you’re charging money, you tend to index a little bit older.
But remember, these are people who grew up in a world where local journalism felt much more substantial. And to do with this question of it feeling old-fashioned, I think that’s a good thing. I think we’re taking new tools, not particularly new, but email newsletters, online subscriptions, paid newsletters, and we’re applying them to techniques that people really like. People really like, well-researched journalism. They really like lovely cultural writing. I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel on that.
Alan:
Last question. Sophie, what’s your favourite? You’ve told us about the homelessness story, the chicken story. Just give us one other example of a great Manchester Mill story that...
Sophie:
Well, I’m going to give you a great example of a wonderful Liverpool Post story. Last year, one of our youngest writers, Jack Walton, wrote a piece about botanical collection in Liverpool in the north of the city in Croxteth Country Park. And the council was planning to cut their funding, which was a tragedy because this botanical collection in its heyday was considered one of the leading collections in the world on a par with Kew Gardens, Calcutta Botanical Gardens, all the hits. They were going to get rid of all of these plants.
And two days after Jack’s piece came out, the counsellors did a complete 180 and said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, we’re not cutting the funding.” Of course, you could argue that this was a coincidence, but given how well the peace did, given the traction it got on Twitter, given all the comments below it, I think it’s fair to argue that we had an influence in that decision. And that story to me illustrates the sort of work we can do.
Alan:
Good story.
Sophie:
We’re covering stuff that impacts people’s day-to-day. I feel like national international news is often prioritised and obviously it’s essential, but it’s these sort of granular council decisions that actually impact people’s lives. We all live in cities or towns, and this stuff does matter. And I guess that story to me just made me feel hopeful about the role that local journalism can play.
Lionel:
I think it’s a great story, holding people to account, making a difference. We should just remind everybody, Alan, Sophie and Joshi, you started this in the middle of COVID. It’s barely four years old. And look where you’ve got. Look where you’ve gotten. Almost sounded American there. But no, congratulations and good luck.
Alan:
It’s a great start and best wishes for expansion and success.
Joshi:
Thanks very much for having us on.
Lionel:
Well, Alan, that was quite inspiring in a way. I did feel, and I think you and I might disagree here, that I’m a great believer in having a commercially sustainable news organisation because I think that then puts you in a much stronger position in defending your independence, your discretion to decide what you publish. What Joshi said on that, at least to us, I found compelling.
Alan:
Yeah, although there is a gap there that we didn’t really pin down I think, and that’s this. I mean, I think what they’re doing is completely laudable and infectious enthusiasm for journalism, which you don’t get from the memos of the chief executive of Reach who just sends out these mournful memos about cuts and clicks. And so here are two people who are building something that is born out of a love for journalism. That’s fantastic.
In terms of where it fits into the coverage of a great city like Manchester, I think we were circling around this question of who does the day-to-day monitoring of the organisations that involve public spending. Now, you can’t do that with two people. And that is going to need some kind of public subsidy.
I think if I were him, I would encourage him to be a bit more front footed. In fact, when he gave evidence to the House of Commons, he was asking for subsidy. He was saying that they wanted money from the big tech companies or that there should be a system in White Hall for distributing public advertising. And that seems to me, fair enough, it’s not an admission of failure to say that in the 21st century where advertising is not coming to these tech companies.
Lionel:
It’s not coming to the startups, it’s going to the tech companies.
Alan:
Yeah. It’s not coming to the startups or to newspapers. If you want people to sit in courts and council meetings, that’s not going to be provided by the market.
Lionel:
I think the tech companies in general have been far too blase about the impact that they have. They’ve sucked all the digital advertising out for themselves and the impact on the ecosystem, terrible word, but just the general newspapers, news organisations of this crushing weight has been substantial. Google’s a little bit better than Meta. They are trying to help at the margin, but somehow I think more money needs to go into supporting the local.
Alan:
And I would completely support people like this. Two or three years ago, I spent an evening in Manchester in a room above a pub with Rasmus Nielsen, the professor of journalism, because I thought it would be good for us to go out and meet people at the coalface working on local news. And there were about 20 journalists there. And it wasn’t an inspiring evening, not because these weren’t great journalists who wanted to do this kind of journalism that Joshi and Sophie were talking about, but they just weren’t allowed to by the business model that these big newspaper companies had gone down. And they were all miserable.
And what I love today is here are two journalists absolutely loving what they’re doing and feeling that they’re plugged into the community and that the community wants them to do this stuff. And that’s where I would put my money. Every time I hear Jim Mullin, I think he’s called the ex-Labro bloke running Reach. And I have to say, after we last talked about this, several Reach journalists got in touch to say, “Absolutely right.”
Lionel:
They reached out.
Alan:
They reached out. But you have to put journalism at the core. That’s where it has to start. You can’t start by talking about business models or clicks.
Lionel:
Tyranny of the clicks is terrible. I do think, it’s not for me to micromanage the middle company, I wouldn’t dare. But if they did have a bit more money and they had a great local voice columnist writing about the community, not shrill political attacks on left or right or Andy Burnham or not, or the conservatives, but writing about the community, ala Mike Royko. I just think that would be such a poor.
Alan:
I grew up reading Mike Royko too. But you’re right, it was a mixture of reportage and voice. And he was a beautiful writer.
Lionel:
And people bought the Chicago Tribune and The Sun Times where he worked just to read Royko. Whereas where are you out there in Manchester?
Alan:
What do you think about the business model, Lionel? I mean, it seems to me they’re being quite cautious. They’re doing the opposite of what websites like Buzzfeed did, which was enormous, extremely fast expansion built on an advertising model that turned out wasn’t there. They’re being very cautious?
Lionel:
No, I think they’re being very sensible in understanding that the money just isn’t going to be on the digital advertising. I think they’re being incredibly sensible in not over hiring, but being lean and mean, as I said. And I think they’ve been also good in looking to give a certain amount of content away free. And then on the value of the content, then try and convert that into subscriptions so you register and then go subscribe.
That’s a model that the FT pursued in the noughties before going to a harder paywall or shall we say, a reinforced fence, I think was the technical term. But the serious point here is their conversion rate, as I saw it in one of the pitch decks, was around 5%. That’s pretty good, actually. But I think now they do need to be a bit more ambitious to scale up a little bit faster. That would be my view.
Alan:
Well, the Manchester Guardian, my old paper started as a startup in Manchester with 11 backers, and look where it is now. Nothing’s impossible. Unless there’s a big media story we can’t ignore, we’re planning a special episode next week to answer your questions about how the media industry operates or should be regulated or about the key people in the UK and worldwide.
Lionel:
If you want to hear our analysis and opinions on any particular media issue, send us a question to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X, formerly Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod.
Alan:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Danny Garlick.
Lionel:
Remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next week when we’ll answer your questions. See you then.
