A statement of intent
How the sausage gets made
We get a lot of emails from people considering signing up as a paying member of The Post, but who want to know a little more about it. Who’s behind it? What’s the mission? Do any of you have any actual journalism experience? Are there any secret investors lurking in the darkness?
So here goes. The Post is an online newspaper. It’s part of a group of three sister websites, alongside The Mill in Manchester and The Tribune in Sheffield. All three focus on high-quality long-form reads, picking a few topics a week and really digging into them, rather than skimming over the surface of dozens. We do often refer to those publications in our newsletters, but maybe some casual readers aren’t aware of the connection.
Myself (Jack) and Abi are the names you’ll see most alongside the stories here, as we’re working full time in Liverpool and the day-to-day of The Post. But there’s also Sophie, who edits our pieces (and occasionally works on culture stories like this one too), Joshi, who founded all three of the publications and used to work at the Evening Standard, Jake who does our lovely illustrations, Steve, who also edits, then Jack (another one), Mollie (who used to run The Post virtually single-handed), Dan, Daniel and Victoria, who all work for our sister publications full time but occasionally muck in with Post stuff. So all in all, quite a lot of people.
We often get the mysterious “who funds you?” and the truth is we’re entirely funded by subscribers. It’s why we have to send out these emails every two weeks or so, annoying though they may be to some I’d hope it’s a lot less annoying than playing whack-a-mole as ads for miracle creams and online betting sites appear all over your screen. And there’s no shady string pullers operating from behind the curtain, we promise.
The Post has a little over 1,100 people paying £7 a month or £65 a year, and between the three publications the total is now just shy of 5,000, which I think is pretty incredible considering the company has only been operating for three years, and two of those three titles — us included — much less time than that. Five thousand people across three northern cities paying for subscriber-funded local media, a model few people believed was even vaguely viable. We now get emails from similar local news projects to ours — with no affiliation — saying that The Post, Mill and Tribune inspired them to set up in Swindon, or Medway or elsewhere. We have our own plans to set up in Leeds and Birmingham in the not too distant future. It’s like a wildfire.
The mission — put broadly — is to try and revolutionise local news in this country. That may well sound ambitious to the point of chronic delusion if you’re just following this one newsletter, (relatively) small as it currently is, but when you look at the broader picture I’d say we’re already on that journey. And us aside, there is a real appetite all over Britain for journalism that values locality and quality over eyeballs and revenue streams.
We make the comparison to the Echo a lot because it’s our relevant counterpart, but zooming out it isn’t really anything to do with the Echo. The Echo — which has loads of talented writers and staff — isn’t in the state it’s in because of anything the people currently working there have done particularly wrong. It is where it is because of a wider climate in which three companies (Reach PLC, DMG Media and News UK) own virtually every local news title in the country and pursue a model in which attracting clicks is the be-all and end-all. It’s understandable to a degree, they need to stay afloat — and writing endless stories about Philip Schofield that have absolutely nothing to do with Liverpool, or coaxing readers into clicking on an article about a man’s “disturbing find” on Formby Beach (a dead rabbit!) — is a means to keeping the lights on. But it’s communities who suffer as a result, because they’re left with a near-absence of scrutiny of local institutions, and a wafer-thin newspaper spilling with crime and tittle-tattle.
We know that not everyone can afford to pay a local media subscription. That’s why half of our work is free to read. Many of our stories, like this one about the massive failings of Sefton Council’s children’s services department or this one about the region’s failure to get a grip of its toxic air problem, are not hidden away behind a paywall. They can attract 30,000+ readers at times, and it’s important that as many people as possible see them. Everyone who reads The Post is absolutely vital for that reason.
But to keep growing, to make a genuine impact both locally and all over the country, to make quality, nuanced, deeply reported journalism at least an option for those who want it, we are reliant on the subscription fees received by our paying members. They pay for the writers, the lawyers, the editors, the freelancers, the illustrations, the lighting, the tea and the instant coffee. If you do believe in what we’re doing and want to see local journalism restored to the quality it ought to have never lost, do consider taking a chance on us.
As always, a massive thank-you, and have a wonderful weekend.
Jack