Mill Media proved that audiences would pay for local news

Founder Joshi Herrmann expanded the company to six UK cities.

When the Manchester Mill launched in 2020, it operated on a simple theory: that local audiences would pay for news as long as it was original and differentiated. It quickly proved that model out and was able to hire its first full-time employee within a matter of months. From there, founder Joshi Herrmann decided to replicate this model across other cities in the UK, and Mill Media now runs six publications that have collectively generated tens of thousands of paid subscribers.

In a recent interview, Joshi discussed why he first got interested in local news, how he decided to expand to different cities, and whether he thinks his model can be copied by other local news startups.

You can watch the interview over here.

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Transcript

Hey, Joshi, thanks for joining us.

0:50

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

0:52

So we're here to talk about this amazing local news media company that you run. Before we start talking about that, you're obviously in the UK, and I just want to get a sense of what the local news ecosystem is there. Obviously, over here in the US,

1:07

there's lots of talk about local news crisis and the prevalence of news deserts as legacy newspapers are shrinking and closing down. What is the situation like in the UK when it comes to local news?

1:21

I think it's similar to the US in the terms of a big drop off in quality, in terms of there being a lot of concern about local kind of democracy reporting not happening the way it was before. You have a similar scenario when you look at the major local slash regional newsrooms.

1:41

They are much smaller than they were before. So you've got a lot of newspapers that used to have 100 journalists and now have you know 25 journalists or 30 journalists or whatever so those similarities are there the difference is that u.s regional journalism used to be stronger than the

2:00

uk because we're a smaller country we never had the same level of strength in our second third fourth fifth tenth biggest cities compared to the big metro areas outside of you know i mean across the u.s you used to have newspapers that had foreign correspondence in every european capital or whatever i'm slightly exaggerating but the

2:18

scale of the regional press in Philly, in Cleveland, in Houston, was stronger than the regional press in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, etc. And therefore, we're not falling from the same incredible height that US regional news has been falling from.

2:36

Do you have areas in the UK that once had a newspaper that don't have any local news coverage at all? Or is it just a matter of most of the newspapers have just gotten smaller?

2:47

Most of the newspapers have gotten smaller. You also have areas which have what I would call a ghost newspaper, which is a newspaper that is still operating, but it doesn't have any original journalism in it. Or if it does, it has one or two pages of original journalism and the rest is aggregated from

3:03

other regions or from other parts of that media company. That is more common than not having a newspaper at all. The thing that I really noticed when I started this company is that in the large cities in the UK... The local newspapers still exist, but they are a very pale shadow of what they used to be.

3:23

And so you get newspapers that used to have dozens more journalists. Now they have fewer and those journalists are tied to their desks quite a lot. And those journalists are being asked to produce a very large number of stories. And that volume is coming at the cost of quality.

3:41

So that's kind of how I see things at the moment.

3:45

Yeah, in the US, we have what some people call zombie papers, where there is a print newspaper. In a lot of localities, we have these things called legal notices, where they're required by law to advertise in the local newspaper. And that's a lucrative advertising mechanism.

4:04

So a lot of these newspaper chains are keeping newspapers alive, even though they don't have it. They're technically not creating any original journalism or something. They're just doing it for those legal notices.

4:13

Yeah, so we have a bit of the same thing in the UK. And I think that for local readers, they have noticed the difference, they've noticed the decline. But what I've realised is a lot of people didn't realise why the decline had taken place.

4:29

The kind of economic factors that have led to this kind of collapse in the business model of local news. And so I found when I started this company, one of the most powerful things I could do is I could explain to people why it is that the local news now feels so much lower quality,

4:45

so much more rushed, so much less considered than it did 20 years ago. Once people understand those processes, they are pretty willing to support sort of new alternatives.

4:57

So prior to launching Mill Media, which we'll talk about in a second, what was your, like, I know you have a background in media and journalism. Did you have any background in local journalism?

5:06

Not really. I mean, I worked for a city newspaper, the London Evening Standard, when I was a young journalist. And I'd worked for national newspapers, you know, in a freelance capacity. I'd worked for a media startup called Tab Media, but I didn't have any explicit local journalism experience. And also when I started the company,

5:22

I wanted to create a form of local journalism that didn't feel like conventional local journalism for a whole variety of reasons that we could we could probably talk about.

5:32

So you launched Manchester Mill, I think in 2020 during the pandemic. What were you doing in the lead up to that?

5:39

So in the lead up to that, I was hoping to write a book. But the book required me being in Poland and Czech Republic and Germany, etc. And then the pandemic started. meant that that kind of research in libraries, et cetera, wasn't going to happen.

5:51

So the whole idea of me writing like a family history book about my family's history and the Holocaust was suddenly off the table and I needed to do something different. So I flew back from the Czech Republic where I was trying to learn Czech at the

6:04

time and decided to do something in the UK that would be a challenge.

6:10

And so you launched the Manchester Mill on Substack, right? I guess, what was the chicken or the egg? Did you learn about Substack and think this could be something that I could run a publication on? Or what was kind of the lead up to the actual launch of it?

6:27

Well, I think I'd been aware of Substack for about a year before that. And the big insight about Substack that... I felt was if I'm willing to pay five bucks a month for like someone to only send me two articles a week, and I'm also paying five bucks a month for The New York Times,

6:45

which sends me like 120 articles a day, then that's a very dramatic shift in the value proposition. And as you know, because you've run a successful subset yourself, the value in that kind of publishing comes from being heavily differentiated. So as long as your content is very different to what else is out there,

7:07

people will give you much more money per word or much, much more money per story or edition. than they would be willing to give a national newspaper. And therefore, as soon as I realized that that kind of shift in expectations of like, because a volume of content had come about, I did think, well,

7:24

that type of business model could really work for local journalism, where frankly, you're going to have to build from a much lower cost base. And a lower cost base means publishing less. If people are willing to pay for a lower volume of content, then local journalism could be done in a different way.

7:41

So if I understand you correctly, so like a lot of like local news startups in the US, like kind of lean one, start as like news aggregate, like smart news aggregation, doing maybe a little bit of original journalism, but really kind of just like curating local news.

7:55

But like you kind of went at it with the opposite idea is like if I could create a lot of differentiation, that would be way more valued by potential subscribers than a national news publication that was also creating original information. Yeah.

8:11

yeah original reporting yeah exactly so so so i thought there is a lack of in-depth writing about uh manchester and the the major local newspaper is still going but it's not producing that kind of work it produces a lot of kind of like daily news

8:27

content a lot of sports content but it doesn't do um that much in the way of kind of deep dives and And so I was a bit inspired by US kind of magazine feature writing, some of the big US magazines that produce a 5,000, 10,000 word story about something.

8:42

And I thought, given that in my career, that's mainly what I've done is writing longer stories. What if I'd see if people will pay for that? And they have to be willing to pay for a very low number of stories, right? Because obviously on my own, I couldn't produce 10 stories every day.

8:57

I couldn't even produce 10 a week. I was writing initially one or two a week and then it went to three or four. But the whole assumption... or the whole hypothesis was, will people pay a good amount of money every month, like a Netflix subscription or whatever, that kind of price point,

9:15

for a very low number of stories about their city if those stories are very, very good, if they're very interesting, very immersive, etc. And so that's the kind of pact I was trying to create with my readers. Will you pay for that? That was the thing I was trying to test.

9:31

So I think you launched maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, July 2020. Does that sound right?

9:36

Yeah, it was at Ballpark. It might have been June, yeah.

9:41

So to start with, you just came right out the gate and you were just doing original, kind of longer, original reporting and stuff like that? Yeah. And was this stuff behind a paywall? Or what were you actually putting out there?

9:55

Yeah, so month one to four, I was writing two stories a week. normally one of them would be like a really long deep dive into something I mean they couldn't be like huge investigations because it was just me but like I wrote a story a historical story about an enslaved man who escaped from slavery in the US

10:12

and then he came to the north of England and he ended up living in Bolton for a while and that was in my catchment area for the mill Greater Manchester so I thought people will like that story I'm going to write a few thousand words And people loved that. And then I did an investigation into, you know,

10:28

a mini online investigation into whether an incident and an attack that had taken place actually took place at where everyone was saying it was. It turned out it didn't. And I kind of did some like online sleuthing about that. And I also wrote a piece explaining why I thought a different type of journalism would work in Manchester.

10:44

I called it the case for a new newspaper in Manchester. And because I had such a good response early on, I think it was three and a half months later or maybe four months later that I decided to start charging or like putting up a pay while seeing people.

10:57

So it was free to begin with.

10:59

It was free for that summer of 2020. And remember, it was a pandemic. So people really wanted like accurate local information. So I started doing little COVID updates once a week. I would summarize the local COVID data. I got quite good at like working out what was happening with the COVID data.

11:14

I pulled all the data from the local sources and I would ask the mayor's office for certain, you know, data points that they weren't releasing at that time. And I kind of remember them thinking, like, who the hell is this guy with his tiny newsletter to be asking us for stuff? But people wanted that information.

11:31

And they liked the fact that I was presenting it in a kind of data led way rather than kind of trying to hype them up into clicking on a link because there was quite a lot of clickbait around about COVID at that time. And so I think, yeah, because in the first few months, people were enjoying it,

11:47

sharing it, telling people, friends about it. It encouraged me to think, OK, maybe I'll get people to get people to pay.

11:54

And so you launched a paywall. What was everything behind a paywall at that point or what was the mix then?

11:59

I think it was half, half. It actually might have been two thirds free, one third paid. I think I was doing three a week after the paywall, after going paid. And I think it was one paid post a week and two free ones. And then eventually I got to my schedule, which I do now,

12:15

which is like 50-50, two paid and two free.

12:18

And what was the initial response from the readers?

12:22

Yeah, I mean, it was really good. That was the first sign that this was maybe going to work as a thing because I think I had 4,000 people on my email list after four months, which I thought was pretty good. And yeah, and then 400 within...

12:37

I think a month of doing the paid launch, 400 of them were paying. So that was 10%. And I made me think, okay, well, I've read online that 10% is a good conversion rate. And it wasn't just that people were writing in, people were sending in stories and saying, you should cover this, you cover that.

12:53

I saw one comment actually on Facebook. where someone said, I've been waiting for someone to do this for ages or something. And I thought, oh, that's a good sign if people really want this to happen. So that was the early data that made me think, yeah, this is really worth doing.

13:09

And were you charging $100 a year at that point? Just trying to think in UK pounds. It was £70 a year. So I'm guessing at the time that would have been about $85 or something. Yeah, maybe $90. Yeah.

13:21

So it wasn't enough to pay a full salary, but you were making pretty decent money within a month. I mean, more than most new sub-stackers make within the first month of launching paid, for sure. Eventually, I think sub-stack did an experiment where they gave a bunch of grants. I don't know if grant is the right word,

13:43

but a bunch of money to a bunch of local news sub-stackers to fund them for a year. I think you were one of the recipients, correct? Yeah, that's right. When did they do that, just about?

13:54

Yeah, that was in 2021. So at that point, I was hoping to launch in two more cities, Liverpool and Sheffield, which are kind of a short drive away. To be honest, if they were in the US, they'd be considered probably one metro area as Manchester. But... I wanted to do those places and I didn't have enough money.

14:11

And the deal effectively was that Substack would take the upfront risk. So they would recoup 85% of the earnings in those cities in the first year. So they would hopefully get some of their money back. I mean, they didn't get all of it back, but it was that kind of deal.

14:23

But it was super helpful because it allowed me to hire a couple of people, which allowed us to get those two new cities up and running. So I'm extremely grateful to Substack for that.

14:32

Yeah. So at that point, had you hired anybody else for the mill or were you still doing that all by yourself? Yeah.

14:39

Yeah, I'd hired one for the mill already, one staff member. And then I hired someone in Sheffield, Dan, and then, so I think we had, I think by the middle of 2021, we had three people in total.

14:55

So what made you, rather than just kind of doubling down and trying to continue to grow in Manchester and just expand from there, what made you decide early on, that early on, that you wanted to expand to more cities?

15:08

Well, I think firstly, I had a sense that sustainable subscription media companies are going to grow gradually rather than exponentially. And I thought the dynamic of growth in this era of media would therefore be nothing like the dynamic of growth we saw in the kind of Facebook VC backed BuzzFeed Vice era. And therefore,

15:31

if it was going to grow gradually, which I thought was the right way for it to grow, if you wanted to grow the business to the kind of scale where you could have like real expertise, you could have an investigations editor or you could have your accounts and your marketing or whatever.

15:49

If you wanted to have the kind of revenue that would support a more ambitious media company, then having it in a few cities made sense to me. And that was like the business case for it. It's like if we can build up enough revenue across a few cities, then we can afford to do much more interesting things.

16:06

And we find now we can do investigative journalism of a much higher quality now than we could a few years ago because we've got much more central resource on those stories. And we have a lawyer, et cetera, which gives us confidence to take on big stories.

16:19

The non-business case was there were journalists getting in touch in lots of cities quite quickly saying, would you ever do this? And there was one journalist in particular, Dan in Sheffield, who I was very impressed by and who I really wanted to work with. And therefore, I needed a bit of cash to do that with him.

16:36

So it was led by the journalist, but it was also led by this feeling that I needed to gain a little bit of scale in order to do the kind of journalism that I wanted to do.

16:48

And was the playbook the same in each city? You would hire an editor and then they would do reporting for several months and then you would gradually roll out the paywall?

16:57

Yeah, similar. But we worked together a lot. So it wasn't like the people in the new city would just do their own thing. The company's always been very much about collaborating. Because remember, our biggest selling point is quality. We have to write stuff that you could not get from your local newspaper. You couldn't get it on Reddit.

17:16

You couldn't get it on a local blog. So we would collaborate a lot to try and make sure that the quality was high enough. But it was basically the same. It was free for a couple of months, then paid, that sort of thing.

17:27

And was it met with like similar response to the one you, the Manchester mill?

17:32

Yeah. It's been slightly different. So the one in, um, in Sheffield, the Tribune, that one has a higher conversion rate. So it probably started off about the same, you know, nine or nine or 10%. But while the conversion rate in a city like Manchester would eventually track down because our, our free list growth became quite intense.

17:53

And, uh, we're probably at like six and a half, seven percent conversion now, which is which is fine. Whereas in Sheffield, it stayed like eight percent or something, even after like two or three years. So I think I see different conversion rates in different cities and I see like different dynamics of how they grow.

18:12

But the basic thing of like the hypothesis is there will be thousands of people who want to pay for this kind of journalism in these cities. I think that seems to have been born out.

18:22

So what happened after the grant money from Substack ran out, like after the year? Were you at a sustainable point at that point?

18:32

Yeah, so we got the mill in Manchester. We got that sustainable a few different times. We'd get it sustainable, then we'd invest. We'd get it sustainable. But the mill became profitable and therefore could pay for the remaining costs that we had on the others. Then the Tribune and Sheffield became...

18:48

And the next one we're hoping to get profitable is Liverpool. So I think like, you know, I always expect to invest in a city for about a year and a half, two years. And then I expect that city to start to be sustainable. And I'd say the mill and the Tribune got there a little quicker than expected.

19:06

The post may be in Liverpool a little bit slower than expected, but basically they're all in this roughly similar trajectory to try and become a breakeven outlets. And then I raised a little bit of money for investors, uh, a year and a half ago so that we could launch in a few more places a little bit faster.

19:22

And then you eventually moved off of Substack. When was that? Yeah, we started moving off Substack... about five months ago we launched two new titles in london and glasgow on ghost uh alternative platform i'm sure a lot of your your listeners as um very newsletter

19:40

savvy people will know about and we've still got two on substack and i think we're moving those over quite soon so uh it's it's a transition that's taken over you know yeah around six months to do What made you decide to move off the Substack? That's a whole episode itself.

19:56

But, you know, there were a bunch of factors. One of them is just the cost factor, right? 10% of revenue becomes quite a lot as the business grows. I think, you know, we would have given Substack about £100,000 this year, which is like $120,000, it starts to feel like quite a lot. Another factor,

20:17

which is a bit harder to explain, but I think your listeners are probably like the one demographic of people who will understand this, is like... Substack is becoming more of a platform. At least that's how I see it. And I was noticing that a larger and larger proportion of our audience were not our audience anymore.

20:34

They were Substack's audience, by which I mean on Substack you can have email subscribers. It's people whose emails you have, and if you leave the platform, you take them. But you also have followers, and followers are people who are only attached to you if you're on Substack, a bit like a Twitter follower, you can't leave with it,

20:52

or a Facebook follower, you can't leave with them. And I just noticed that had been creeping up. So to give you an example, on the mill, we had 56,000 people on our email list, but it actually wasn't. Two and a half thousand of them weren't on our email list. And when we wanted to leave, we lost them.

21:10

And because that percentage was ticking up in each city...

21:12

What do you mean they weren't on your email list? They were followers and not email subscribers?

21:16

They were followers. So they had subscribed via the Substack app, and they would get our alerts on the app, but they wouldn't get our emails. And so what I felt was that our... Oh, wait, wait.

21:26

Sorry, sorry. They had given you their email address, but they had opted to receive the new issues. So there are followers where you don't get their email address, but then there are people who give you their email address, but they click the option that they just want to read it within the Substack app.

21:45

with notifications so was that was it the latter or the former just to clarify i'm

21:50

actually a little bit unclear i'm i'm fairly sure it was the latter i'm sure fairly sure it was people who had we never had their emails um but rather than because i think even if you turn off the email um uh delivery the publisher still has the

22:06

emails and and can leave with them so but but what i noticed was we had an increasing number of these and obviously two and a But it was as a percentage, it was going up every month. And that makes total sense for Substack. If I was them, I would also want to be a platform.

22:23

But what it meant was that I felt we were having a less and less direct relationship with our readers. And as an independent media company where all of the value is in your relationship with your readers, I felt like if it went on for another six months, a year or whatever...

22:37

we would be seeding the relationship to a platform, which ultimately could become more algorithmic or certainly would have a lot of power because you can't take those people with you. So I ultimately felt Substack's been amazing for us so far, really appreciate the team there, really like them.

22:55

And I'm really glad that we were on Substack for four years, but that long-term for like an independent media business like ours, it made more sense for us to start building our own independent stack.

23:05

So do your publications have accounts on traditional social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and all that kind of stuff?

23:13

Yeah, we do.

23:14

We do. So I don't want to make this a debate about Substack. I'm almost wary to do this. But why is it okay to have an account on Facebook that doesn't allow you to have a direct relationship with your audience? But the moment that a social platform is layered onto an email platform, then it's not okay. Yeah.

23:34

Why does it matter if Substack allows you to have followers when you obviously see the value of having followers on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Blue Sky or something like that? Why is it all of a sudden bad when that is layered on top of an email platform that still allows you to...

23:53

you know collect email addresses because like the way that i've like kind of framed this is like subset like you think of like the purchase funnel and the obviously the the paid subscriber is the bottom of the funnel the email subscriber is slightly higher up the follower is just a layer above that and so you're getting followers

24:13

And you're getting kind of the centralized impact, the centralized power of a social network that is then helping you move those followers down the funnel and turn into email subscribers. I don't understand the logic of why it's okay to have an account on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook.

24:29

But the very second that you add the ability to also sign up for a newsletter, then all of a sudden those benefits no longer apply. I think the reason...

24:41

The logic is, and I'm not saying it's bad, it's just whether it's suitable for you as a business. The logic is that your primary reader relationship for an email newsletter is where you drop into people's inbox. And therefore, if an increasing number of people are signing up to follow you, but you are not getting their email...

25:03

then that is really weakening your primary relationship. When I think of Instagram followers or Facebook followers, I never expect them to be our primary relationship. I expect that to be a top-of-funnel secondary relationship. But I want to make sure that people who decide to get our emails or people who decide to get our newsletters,

25:20

we are communing with them directly. And I think what you'll find on platforms where... like Substack or other places, it will get harder for you to drive people from the follower bit of the funnel to the paid bit of the funnel because that won't be necessarily in the interest of Substack for you to then get their emails,

25:42

right? And I'm not saying Substack acting nefariously here. Like I really like Substack. I recommend people join it all the time. But if you're an independent publisher who wants to have people's emails so you can go back and forth with them, I don't think it's a good thing for an increasing proportion of your people to be

25:58

people who are followers rather than email subscribers.

26:01

So I'll push back one more time and then we'll move on. So the only way that Substack makes money right now if they become a paid subscriber to a newsletter... And the only way someone becomes a paid subscriber is if they give you their email address. So Substack has every incentive to drive signups to the newsletter.

26:20

If all of a sudden tomorrow they launch an advertising product where they get just as much benefit from just having people locked into their ecosystem, then... Yes, but right now they have all their incentives were aligned with getting people from that top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel because it's not until you

26:37

collect an email address that they can even make money.

26:40

Do you think in future when people are paying you via Substack for a subscription that you will definitely have their email and you'll have a direct relationship?

26:48

Yeah. I mean, as of right now, yeah. I mean, they haven't indicated otherwise. Obviously, I can always change my priors based on if they change the dynamic. But as of right now, Substack doesn't make money unless I have this person's email address. So therefore, Substack is incentivized to drive people down the funnel. But anyway...

27:10

That's my last pushback on that. But you moved to Ghost for all of these. And you said you've launched more. So how many different publications do you run?

27:20

We've got six now.

27:23

And what's kind of like the starter kit of a city for you? Like, you know, 6am city usually hires two editors per city. What's kind of your starter kit for launching in a new city?

27:35

Yeah, it's kind of evolved really, because we used to start on such a budget, you know, we'd have one reporter in a city and then a bunch of freelance on top of that. And now it's, you know, we've got a little bit more money. So when we launched The Londoner, our London publication, we launched with three writers,

27:50

you know, and then one of them is now becoming an editor. So we've got a little bit more cash now and we can do things a little bit more properly. In Manchester now, we have three reporters and one editor and then freelance on top of that. So, you know, it's evolved now.

28:08

Obviously, in an ideal world, we'd have more, right? You'd love to have more. But I've always really believed in keeping the costs low and staying disciplined and trying to bring in a number of people where you can really train them to do what you want to do. Because our journalism is like...

28:27

Different to maybe other newsletters, it's quite a distinctive form of in-depth writing. And it's difficult to train a lot of people how to do that in quick succession. So yeah, a starter pack would be a team of, let's say, three. Sometimes it's two. Building up relationships with freelance contributors who we can pay for individual stories.

28:52

um and creating a brand and then making the case for why this why this publication

28:58

is worth you know supporting and do you do any kind of like curation now or is it a hundred percent you don't ship a piece of content unless it's like a hundred percent original or have you created like a daily newsletter that kind of rounds up

29:13

news in the area or like what's kind of like your your content cadence um

29:18

Yeah, I mean, we've always had a bit of aggregation because I always think part of our value is that people trust us. If we've got a really high degree of trust, then we want to be the people who recommend the best stuff from other places too. So even from the beginning,

29:32

even when I was competing with the Manchester Evening News in Manchester, I would recommend Manchester Evening News stories every time I send an edition. So I traditionally would send a piece of journalism, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 words long, And then I would recommend like three or four stories before that that people

29:46

should go and read or things that people listen to or stuff on YouTube that people would like about the local area. So we've always aggregated a bit. I think that gives people a sort of a little sense that like you don't need to go shopping everywhere else because the mill has recommended the most interesting local stuff.

30:02

We've always had a Monday edition that was mainly aggregational. And then the other three editions were like mainly like, you know, a longer form story with some aggregation at the top. So I'm not like... pious at all about everything having to be original ultimately what we're trying to

30:16

do is serve the reader and the readers find it really difficult to find good content now because the online websites are so horrible to use I don't know if you've ever been on a UK newspaper website but like they're very very like bad user experience so we try and recommend things that people will like our cadence is

30:34

always roughly been the same you send out a monday briefing on monday which is more aggregating and recommending and then you send out further editions on a wednesday thursday saturday that are more our in-depth work um and and that's kind of been our our cadence for for quite a while now

30:50

Do you do any kind of, like, crowdsourcing or anything? Like, at some of the smartest places in the U.S., they're, like, there's, like, this blog in D.C. called Prince of Petworth that's just incredible. Like, he's really primed his audience of, like, any time he sees anybody spots, like, a restaurant opening or hears gunshots or something, like...

31:10

They're immediately emailing him or tagging him on social media. Have you tried to create any kind of crowdsourcing mechanisms or anything like that with your publications?

31:19

That's really cool, actually. I like the sound of that. Yeah, we do a lot of crowdsourcing. We have a thing called Open Newsroom where we will write in newsletters, what are we working on? And then we'll ask people to get in touch. So we don't mind giving away what kind of stories we're on,

31:34

even if that threatens sometimes getting scooped by someone else, because we really want the contacts. And we find in our local audiences, you'll often find the kind of people who can really help out with the story. So we do that. We have a lot of email back and forth with our readers. And, you know,

31:50

I would say about 50% of our good stories come directly from readers, or at least they start with a reader tip. This week, we've had a story about a local university where a bunch of readers came to us because they were really concerned about a senior figure at the university and misusing, I guess,

32:08

like kind of being abusive towards staff, being racist, etc., And, you know, they came to us and we reported the story out for a few weeks. We did the story. The guy's now been sacked by the university, etc. So that was quite a classic one where a few people trusted us with a bit of information.

32:25

And then we like really, really tried to report it out.

32:28

And what's your revenue mix now? Like, I think you're still mainly subscriptions, but you're starting to dabble in like advertising and stuff like that.

32:35

Yeah, we're about... 85 87 percent subscriptions and then with that we've got some advertising going as well generally kind of low volume high quality advertising people who want to reach our audience with quite like a strategic message that's where we've where we try to focus is it like native advertising in a newsletter or what's yeah within the

32:57

newsletter so like today's edition is sponsored by and it'd be like the local museum or the local gallery We've done a couple with the larger companies. The Financial Times did a campaign with us to advertise their subscriptions. We're trying to get some larger clients because obviously it's less work on our end to get the money in.

33:14

But it's not yet a large part of our revenue, but I would like it to be a larger one, mainly for revenue diversification purposes, just so we've got a nice mix. Do you have a salesperson working for you? No, not yet. We're in the middle of trying to bring one in. Yeah.

33:30

Well, I mean, like you're in so many different cities that you could really you could have national advertisers, especially given how, you know, geographically small the UK is, I would guess.

33:40

Yeah. Yeah. That's the hope that we could bring some national advertisers and also have some good local repeat ones. And that could be a good business. I don't think it'll ever be as big as subscriptions for us. I don't really want it to be. I kind of always want us to be like primarily reader funded.

33:55

But I think it's a good extra line for us.

33:58

And do you create any non-written content, like podcasts, videos, stuff like that?

34:03

Yeah, we do a weekly podcast on The Mill called the Manchester Weekly from The Mill, where we talk about stories. And that's kind of like trying to give our readers behind the scenes on the stories, rather than like, it's not like original reporting on the podcast, but it's kind of like, here's how we got to this story,

34:18

here's how we broke it, here's how the lawyers helped us to get it out there, etc.

34:22

And what do you see is the value that that drives?

34:27

You know, not huge at the moment. I think it's like... Something we want to get better at, I suppose we've always been very focused on text and on email newsletters. And I think there's a lot of value in focus. I think a lot of media companies have struggled in the past 10 years because

34:41

they've been pulled in 20 different directions by different platforms and different formats. But I'd like to do more with audio. I think there's a real power in being able to listen. I'd like all our stories to be able to be stories that you could listen to with being read out by the journalist.

34:55

I think it would open up our potential market to lots of people who frankly just don't really like reading that much they like the they might like the content but they don't really like reading so in future I'd like us to have a lot more sophistication on audio right

35:10

now we don't really have it is it just an audio only podcast or is there a video component as well yeah just audio yeah yeah what about events Yeah. We do some events, but we don't yet do events in a kind of like revenue generating way. I mean, like we make a tiny bit of money from them.

35:28

I mainly see events as the real bottom of the funnel, like engaging your super users. I kind of think there's like... When someone joins your free email list, that's stage one. And stage two is when they become a paying subscriber. And then I think there's a whole thing below that,

35:43

which is like you want some of your paying subscribers to become such big fans of your publication that they're telling 20 friends every month about you, that they are... distributing your print edition that you did as a one-off, that they are kind of encouraging people they know to give their stories to you, etc.

36:03

Those kind of people, I think, are the kind of people who come along to your events. And I think, therefore, events are a great way to engage people who are going to be, like, your real super fans. Like, a lot of our opportunities have come about because our real super fans have, like...

36:18

open doors for us and so i i see events as a way to generate that kind of thing i mean and they're good events like i interviewed the editor of the the guardian recently kath viner she doesn't give a lot of interviews um and she like runs the

36:32

guardian globally so like we could have a very interesting conversation about media about manchester because that's where the guardian started originally historically and we had like a hundred ish people there 120 maybe in a beautiful old library in Manchester. So that was a cool event. It was a good value for our audience.

36:50

It helps us to engage with the people who like us most. Maybe in future we'll be better at making a lot of money from those things. But for now, I see it as a way of us getting to know the people who read us.

37:01

And how much are you encouraging kind of like boots on the ground type journalism, like going to people's houses or places of business and stuff like that versus phone calls and stuff like that?

37:10

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, my whole vision is that you do a lot of boots on the ground. And some of our best stories have been based on going to a neighborhood and speaking to a bunch of people and finding out what is going on.

37:26

And in the early days before we even had an office, like a lot of the journalism was that. And I have found since we got an office, you know, we have a co-work in some cities and office in others.

37:36

I do find you have to make you have to work a bit harder to get people to go and do that, because obviously, like you're in the comfort of the office and suddenly you're calling people up all the time. And, you know, there are some stories where it is about looking through people's financial

37:48

accounts and having phone calls. But a lot of the journalism that people most love, that readers most love, is when they feel like they are meeting people. Like you are giving people an opportunity to meet people via your journalism. So it's a big part of what we do.

38:04

So how much do you, and this is something I ask just about every local news entrepreneur that I have on the podcast, is how much do you think that the model that you've created can be replicated in other cities, towns, localities, and stuff like that by other local news entrepreneurs?

38:23

Yeah, I think it definitely can. I mean, we've seen, haven't we, in the US that a different type of model, which is more of an aggregation model, but with a bit of original thrown in, that can be very much scaled to lots of different cities. There are different companies doing that.

38:40

And Axios being the most famous, but I know you've interviewed others. I think that the model we're doing is clearly harder to... spin up because it's a particular type of journalism that is quite in depth and it's quite hard to write and quite hard to edit and stuff i don't think it's like

38:59

if you said to me okay you've got 10 million pounds can you spread this to 25 places in a year like i would really struggle to do that because finding the kind of people who can do this kind of reporting edit this kind of reporting um i think that's that's tricky but i know that

39:17

When you go to different cities, it does work. Like, I've seen that. You know, I guess I can ultimately only say it's a huge success when we've got like 10,000 people in every city paying, not like 2,000 or 3,000 people paying. But I can see the trajectories that we're going to have a lot of people paying in

39:32

all these cities. And I think that, you know, the constraint... is can you find the right type of people to do it? So I think some of these other models that you've interviewed probably are more like blitz scalable, but I think ours is one that in the long term will have a ton of value because I

39:50

think the relationship people have with our brands is quite deep and quite trusting. And I think that building long-term value is something that media brands should think a lot about, I think, because we've just come out of an era, the 2016, 2017 Facebook era, where a lot of people built traffic, but they didn't actually build long-term value.

40:10

And I think I'm quite focused on that kind of long-term play.

40:17

So, you know, looking ahead to like three to four years from now, what would you like to be doing that you're not doing now? Would you rather be in more cities or would you rather be expanding in the cities that you already are?

40:28

I think actually I've kind of reached the point where I'm becoming more interested in building deeper routes in the places we are than going to another 10 places. I'm sure we will go to other cities because we still get these messages from journalists. And it's still like if you get a great journalist getting in touch from Leeds,

40:45

for example, that's very similar to Manchester. and so i think like you know when the ft wrote about us about a year ago there's a guy in the comments being like i like this company but i don't get why they haven't

40:55

gone to leeds whatever and it's true it does make sense to go to leeds so if the right person comes along in leeds we will do that but i'm actually becoming more interested in it's like okay we've got a lot of the great cities in the uk what can

41:07

we now do to like deepen what we're doing i'd I'd rather have like a really great audio component to what we do so that we can access a whole bunch of people in Manchester, Liverpool, London, etc. who currently wouldn't pay. I'd probably rather have that than have like another six cities.

41:25

I think that would be more interesting as a business.

41:29

Okay, Joshi, those are all the questions I have for you.

41:31

Where can people find you online? They can find me at Yoshi on Twitter, on X-J-O-S-H-I. And they can hit up millmedia.co.uk to find out about the company.

41:43

Awesome. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me. Cool.

41:47

Thank you, man.