Dear readers — I hope you’re having great weekends (and aren’t curled up in the foetal position under the duvet mourning Friday’s Jurgen Klopp news). But while all good things must come to an end, I hope that isn’t the case for local media in Liverpool, which I’m afraid to say is in a parlous state.
Let’s start with some positive news. We can now officially say that one in every 100 people in the Liverpool City Region is reading this email. Our email list recently passed 20,000 and there are just over 1.5 million residents across Liverpool, Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral and Halton, meaning that more than 1% of residents are now Post readers. Congratulations: you are among the 1% wisest and most discerning residents of a recently formed administrative region.
A series of popular stories have taken us to that milestone, including our great investigation into the fate of Woolton cinema, yesterday’s lovely laundrette piece by Ophira Gottlieb and my own story on Thursday about the hotly-disputed fall of Jacaranda Records, which is something I’ve been looking into for several months. When we publish these stories we get a flurry of new readers joining our list and lots of great messages and emails saying how much people enjoyed them.
“Lovely piece!,” one person wrote under our weekend read yesterday, “The Post is setting a whole new standard in journalism.”
But now let me give you another percentage: 6%. That’s the proportion of our readers who have so far joined up as paying members. We have 1,316 members as it stands, who each get eight extra members-only stories from us each month and who take part in our comments and will soon be attending our first members-only event of the year.

Most importantly, those 1,316 are the people who make the journalism we do available to everyone else. Their subscriptions allow us to pay fantastic freelance writers like Ophira and brilliant investigative newshounds like Matt O'Donoghue; fund the salaries of our small team of staff writers; pay for the lawyers we use when we are writing a story that could get us sued by a big company or a powerful person if it isn’t properly checked.
Actually, that’s not quite true: their subscriptions don’t pay for all of those things. The Post is growing every month but we aren’t yet breaking even: we still rely on cross-subsidy from our sister titles in Sheffield and Manchester and some of our costs are still funded by the investment our company got last year from leading lights in the world of media like Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN and former boss of the New York Times.
Getting Mark’s support was a big deal for us. For someone of his stature to say he is backing our three-year-old startup company “because of the exceptional quality of its journalism,” meant a lot. But he also said something else when explaining his motivations for investing:
“Britain’s cities need great commercially-sustainable journalism to inform the public and hold powerful institutions to account.”
Commercially sustainable. That’s our big goal. You might think we spend all our time thinking about the next big investigation, but actually, our goal is bigger than that. The holy grail is to turn The Post into a title that can become commercially sustainable so that it can tell these stories not just this year but for many years to come.
We pride ourselves on telling stories that expose wrongdoing, yes, but also stories that give people joy; stories that spread good ideas and give people a greater feeling of connection to the place they live and and the people around them. And we think that as the print media disappears, local radio withers, high streets thin out and so many other local institutions are cut back as a result of austerity and inept governance, the need for organisations like The Post grows. We need local institutions in Liverpool and across this region that can maintain a sense of social fabric; that can tell stories, keep local histories alive and connect people.
The dramatic collapse of the local press is one of the starkest changes to take place in recent decades. This week, the boss of Reach Plc (the giant media conglomerate that owns the Echo, the Daily Express and dozens more titles across the country) admitted the “inconvenient truth” that his print titles are set to become loss-making in the next five years. Jim Mullen also explained with admirable honesty why journalists at once-proud newspapers like the Echo are now forced to churn out trivial celebrity stories and re-written press all day. (This month the Echo has managed to pump out ten stories about former Corrie star Michelle Keegan, including stories about her “flawless makeup” and her “stylish and warm” gilet).
“Asked about the strategy of flooding its websites with stories, Mullen indicated that reader engagement and the quality of articles did not drive revenues as much as volume of content,” reported the Guardian. “We are in the real world,” Mullen said. “I need to get the page views, that is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue. I know it is not ideal. We don’t talk about engagement and quality. We do, but it is not in the trading report.”
It was another way of saying that the model followed by Reach and the Echo simply does not work. You cannot fund quality journalism via a business model based on online ads. The ads require you to pump out massive volume; the journalism requires you to spend lots of time on stories.
It’s why the quality media companies that have succeeded in recent years, like the Economist and the New York Times, have built their digital strategies around subscriptions, not ads. Subscriptions mean that you make much more revenue per user than you would ever make from ads, and that means you can serve those readers rather than chasing random eyeballs online.
It’s impossible to reconcile a business model relying on eyeball maximisation with quality. Even Mullen knows it. The reason we ask our readers to pay £7 a month (or £65 a year) is more than just choosing one business model over another. We fundamentally believe it is the only way quality local journalism can survive. If we gave all our pieces away for free we too would be reduced to late nights scrolling Michelle Keegan’s Instagram or attempting to spin Martin Lewis’s every utterance into a story with a misleading headline that includes the words “Martin Lewis warns”.
To become commercially sustainable at our current cost base, we need around 1,500 members, so just 184 more than we have now. After that, we’ll be hunting down 2,000, so that we can afford to have another full-time staff member on the team. We only need 21 more newbies to join up this month to hit our monthly target, with three days left.
Right now, 6% of the readers on our list pay and the remaining 94% do not. I don’t say that to make anyone feel bad — I know there are so many things that demand your money every month and that great writing or local news can feel like luxuries rather than necessities.
But let me tell you: if you value The Post and you can afford to part with £7, the best way to make sure we’re still around for years to come is to hit that button below. A lot of things are weakening and collapsing in the world right now, but this little online newspaper has been an unexpected success story. We’d love you to become a bigger part of it.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
Jack