I’m not sure what I was expecting of Mill Media’s HQ: en route to Manchester, where the business is based, I vaguely picture people frantically hot-desking in a WeWork-style shared space. But whatever was in my mind, it’s nothing like the reality. The digital publisher of local news whose cheerleaders include Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker, and Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN, has made its home high in the roof of the magnificent Royal Exchange, in a trio of rooms, little wider than corridors, that contain not one bit of boring, Scandinavian-inflected office furniture. Staff here joke that Joshi Herrmann, the company’s charismatic founder, is as good at interior design as he is at journalism, and in a single glance you can see why. Squashy sofas, battered dark wood desks, standard lamps with tasselled shades: he bought them all himself, secondhand, on Facebook Marketplace.
Herrmann, who’s in his mid-30s, takes me into the third of the rooms, where we sit in two old-fashioned armchairs beside a bureau on which there’s a manual typewriter. Is it just for show or does he use it? “I do use it, yes,” he says, with a rueful smile. “I’ve got three of them.” A typewriter, he tells me, is useful when he’s trying to come up with ideas: “It slows you down and, once you’ve started [to write], you can’t go back. It kind of focuses you.” But perhaps, too, such a machine is akin to a totem here: a symbol of Mill Media’s singular identity. For while his company, which is barely four years old, is very much a new media business – there is no paper product; readers receive content via a Substack newsletter – in some other ways, it could not be more quaint if it tried.
Herrmann has no interest in traffic, let alone in clickbait; even the daily news cycle is something he sees only distantly, as if out of the corner of his eye. His focus is altogether more esoteric. Today, one of his newsletters, the Tribune, which serves Sheffield, published a 2,600-word piece about millstone grit, the local stone. In 48 hours, it will send out another story, this one 3,500 words long, about Park Hill, the brutalist estate made famous by the hit musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, in which its writers ask what has happened to the social housing its refurbishment promised. Both, he says, are “perfect” examples of the kind of work – in-depth, hyperlocal, occasionally slightly eccentric – on which, seemingly against the odds, he has successfully built his rapidly burgeoning subscriber-based business.
Only a lot of trial and error, one imagines, could lead to such a back-to-the-future project, and so it proves. The path here has not been straightforward. Herrmann caught the journalism bug at Cambridge, where he worked on a student news website, the Tab; after graduating in 2011, he then spent four happy years on the features desk of the London Evening Standard, followed by two in New York where the Tab, having expanded across Britain, was now trying to crack the US (he was its editor-in-chief). This was a heady period and, in retrospect, also a controversial one. In 2019, after he’d returned to the UK following the death of his father, it was reported in the Cut, an online offshoot of New York magazine, that he had engaged in consensual but inappropriate relationships with junior staff at the Tab – allegations he has never denied.
“It’s difficult to talk about,” he says, when I ask about this. “To make a mistake and then for it to be so public: your instinct as a man in the context of relating to women is to be defensive. But while I would quibble with some details, the big picture was accurate. Like a lot of men after #MeToo, I went from being oblivious of power dynamics to being very aware of them indeed, and that’s a good thing.” He regrets what happened, but he also believes the experience informs the way he runs his current business: “Your job as a boss is to look at how things will pan out for other people.”
In early 2020, he moved to Brno in the Czech Republic, hoping to learn the language and to write a book about his Moravian roots (his Jewish grandparents came to Britain as refugees). But before he could even begin to get his tongue around all those consonants, the pandemic arrived to stop him in his tracks. “I had to come back, and that was when I began to think, as we were all forced to be more domestic: what do people really appreciate about where they live? They’ve lost local journalism more than they’ve lost national journalism: why don’t I address that at the same time as doing the kind of journalism I like, which is more considered and experimental?” Covid 19, he says, encouraged a lot of people to do things they might not have usually done – and he was one. “I don’t think I would have done any of this in normal times. It’s quite hard now to reconstruct what I was thinking. I suppose it was a case of: why not?”
He grew up in Sussex but had always wanted to live in the north: “And I support Manchester United. So I just moved.” Surely there must have been more to it than this? “Well, I’d had an idea. But where would it work? A city this size… the existing media… I thought it might.” A previous experiment had taught him that people can get long reads in lots of places already (he’d tweeted out “an unbelievably long piece” he’d written about Carl Beech, the man who falsely claimed to be a victim of a Westminster paedophile ring, only to meet the sound of silence when he asked those who clicked if they wanted more). This time, then, he would give them what they definitely could not get elsewhere: a local long read. The first things he wrote were based on “just wandering around”, but he knew within days he was on to something. Word spread quickly. “I started charging for subscriptions in September 2020, barely four months in.”
He called the Manchester newsletter the Mill. But he found himself writing about Liverpool, too, and by the end of the year, he had established the Post, its Merseyside sibling. The following spring, spurred on by inquiries from readers and journalists alike, another followed: the Tribune in Sheffield. Last year, a fourth joined the stable in the form of the Dispatch in Birmingham. Mill Media now employs 11 full-time staff at these four titles as well as several part-timers. By the end of 2024, this will have risen to 22 as the company expands into Glasgow and London, where the daily Evening Standard, after almost two centuries in the capital, is to drop to a weekly print edition (major redundancies are expected).
How many people read these newsletters? More than 100,000 are signed up to receive free content; about 8,000 pay for a full service. Is it possible to run a solvent business based on such numbers? “In the beginning, we got a grant from Substack, which had put aside money to encourage local journalism,” says Herrmann. “Last year, we also raised money [£350,000] from some investors [these include CNN’s Thompson, a former director-general of the BBC and the ex-chief executive of the New York Times, Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of Axios, which has a network of local news sites in the US, and Turi Munthe, the founder of now defunct photojournalism website Demotix]. But most of our income is from subscriptions. The money side is straightforward. For the past six months, we’ve been breaking even. The Mill is profitable. The Post is a few months away from profitability. The rest will follow; it takes about two years. Our business isn’t super risky. It’s sustainable.” Did his investors put money in for commercial reasons or just because they like what he’s doing? It’s mainly the latter. “One is a big lawyer in the north-west who has subscribed to the Mill from the start. He thinks it’s a good business, but mostly it’s love for him.” Is he still looking for investors? “Not at the moment, no. We’ve got money in the bank.” He grins. “I’ll let you know when we are.”
His model relies for its success on a close, even intense, relationship with subscribers, because, in the end, they’re all that count. Daniel Timms, Mill Media’s head of commercial, tells me readers skewed older at first, but that this is changing now. A significant cohort are new to their cities or have recently returned; others read from afar, keen to stay in touch with where they grew up (I subscribe to the Tribune for this reason). Either way, though, they get an eclectic mix, some pieces sharply probing, others more fond and tender. Mill Media’s journalists do some excellent investigative reporting. Among their more high-profile recent hits, one standout might be the Mill’s story about Sacha Lord, the night time economy advisor to Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, in which it was alleged that his company received £400,000 from the Arts Council’s pandemic recovery fund though it has no history of staging artistic events (Lord soon withdrew his threat to sue Mill Media; the Arts Council is now investigating). The week after its publication brought 272 new paid subscribers; if they stay for a year, this will represent £24,000 in annual revenue. Stories about housing and what one reporter describes to me as “dodgy employers” are popular – and important, too, if you believe in public interest journalism. But such scrutiny is leavened with warmth. Those who read the Post, for instance, love its writer David Lloyd: his passion for Liverpool, and his frustration with its custodians; his deep knowledge of the city.
Herrmann believes he has turned current journalistic orthodoxy on its head. For him, less is more. Each newsletter publishes only a small number of pieces weekly, and they’re heavily edited. “If you’re only putting out four stories a week, you can’t have any misses,” says Sophie Atkinson, a senior editor who describes herself as a frustrated American magazine journalist. She, like Herrmann, finds it hard to explain what makes a Mill Media story: it’s a gut thing. But when they get it right – and when they don’t – there is always back and forth with readers. “Nowhere else do you get this level of engagement, comments, emails, tips. It’s exciting and rewarding. We ran a piece recently that asked if Manchester theatre had a class problem, and two of those who commented really fiercely were Julie Hesmondhalgh [the actor] and Maxine Peake [the actor and writer], who’d been mentioned in the piece.”
All this has brought Herrmann plenty of attention. In April, he appeared at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where he spoke of “taking on the challenge other companies are leaving behind”. In May, he was a star turn at Truth Tellers: the Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit 2024, an event co-hosted in London by Tina Brown (Evans, her late husband, rose to edit the Northern Echo in Darlington and the Sunday Times). On his panel were such masters of the media universe as Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, and Jeff Zucker, the boss of RedBird IMI, the UAE-backed partnership that hoped to buy the Telegraph and the Spectator (it walked away last April, following the introduction of government legislation to block the ownership of UK media assets by foreign states).
It was Mark Thompson who introduced him to Brown, telling her as he did that what he likes about Mill Media is the fact it aims to make a profit rather than to rely on, say, philanthropy or grants. So what about money? Is it important to him? And, if it is, doesn’t this mean that, at some point, he’ll walk away? He shakes his head. “A lot of initiatives have created short-run things, funded with a grant here and a grant there,” he says. “But they have no secure foundation.” He does believe in public interest journalism – only last night he listened in to a council meeting as background for a project – but you need more than principles if you’re not to fizzle out in a difficult climate. “I’m not a saint, and I’m not running a charity. It [making money] is about motivation. It imposes a discipline because you need what you do to be bloody good.”
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Local news is in dire straits. Hundreds of newspaper titles have been lost; cuts to BBC local radio have left stations sharing content for much of the day; local TV channels – a big idea of Jeremy Hunt’s when he was culture secretary – are a busted flush, screening almost no regional output. More than 4 million people in the UK live in news “deserts”, places where there is no adequate local journalism; millions more find themselves in “drylands”, where coverage is patchy and teetering. “Newspaper-wise, it’s basically in the hands of three companies: Newsquest [owner of, among other titles, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus], National World [the Scotsman] and Reach [the Manchester Evening News],” says Jonathan Heawood, executive director of the Public Interest News Foundation. Such companies, in the face of profits that have fallen by more than 80% in recent years, have ruthlessly filleted their newsrooms, leaving local councils and other institutions to operate barely scrutinised, if at all (according to figures published by Press Gazette, the number of local journalists has fallen from about 13,000 in 2007 to 4,000 now). “Research shows that spending on local news can lead to improved public spending in government,” he says. “But once that watchdog function is gone, corruption increases.” There is also, he adds, a strong correlation between the decline of local news and the decline of voter registration and turnout.
Successive governments have done nothing to alleviate this situation, despite a review by Dame Frances Cairncross in 2019, and several other parliamentary inquiries since, all of which pointed out the parlous state of the sector. “At the moment, a lot of public money goes to big publishers [Reach etc] through local government in the form of the public notices: about £70m a year,” says Heawood (public notices are information that local government is obliged to publish locally). “It’s not straightforward to change this: those publishers still employ large numbers of local journalists. What about them? But you could look at the system nonetheless.” Some of this money might profitably, he believes, go to other outlets, and he has already written to the new culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, to say so.
But he thinks, too, that there are grounds for optimism. If Mill Media is one model – he admires it, too – philanthropy is another. “Some US states now have a local news fund and philanthropists put their money in that, rather than into the organisation itself, so you don’t get a billionaire showing up in the newsroom.” Non-profit journalism is a third. The Bristol Cable is run as a cooperative. In Scotland, two non-profits, Greater Govanhill and the Ferret have come together to open the UK’s first community newsroom. Social Spider Community News, which has six London-based websites, is a social enterprise. Finally, there is the Guildford Dragon. In February, it became the UK’s first charitable public interest provider, and will now be able to benefit from tax breaks (those who give money to it will also get tax relief on donations).
“It was a long haul,” says George Brock of the Charitable Journalism Project, an organisation that helped the Dragon with its application. “But it is a breakthrough. In the past, people thought charitable status would mean they were no longer able to do strong political opinion. But this isn’t the case. What the Charity Commission doesn’t like is the single-minded pursuit of the political agenda of one political party.” The Guildford Dragon will continue to express what could be described as political opinions, but it is not partisan in a party political sense.
Brock, a former managing editor of the Times who began his career on the Yorkshire Evening Press, is another who refuses to be gloomy: “Journalism is inherently unstable,” he insists. “Go back to Dickens, a journalist as well as novelist. He was terrible at starting publications; he lived in a time when print was totally unstable, things always popping up and falling down. The 1970s, when I started out, was an unusually stable period. People are reinventing the model now, and they’re bound to multiply. The diversity is already quite extraordinary.”
All this, though, is for the future. After talking to Herrmann, I take a train to Sheffield to meet the two-strong staff of the Tribune – who, it turns out, actually do have desks in a co-working space (it has an on-site barista, but it’s run as a cooperative and there are many pot plants). Their stories reinforce what Herrmann told me. Dan Hayes gave up a better-paid job at the Sheffield Star to join, having written to Herrmann to tell him he thought he was on to something long before the Tribune became a reality: “I saw what he was doing in Manchester and I thought: this is the future.” When he joined the Star in 2015, there was still an emphasis on what he calls “proper” journalism. “But then a calculation was made around clickbait. The equation changed in the six years I was there. I got incredibly bored of the … churning.” His colleague Victoria Munro, meanwhile, was the editor of the Waltham Forest Echo, one of Social Spider’s outlets. “I like doing investigative work, but I had to carve out my own time to do it,” she says. She isn’t from Sheffield; she moved for this job. Both of them praise Herrmann’s persuasiveness, commitment and – above all – enthusiasm.
As they talk, I wonder how Mill Media will tackle London, a bigger and more complex challenge than he has faced before. I do wonder if Herrmann and his team sometimes forget an adage attributed to Harry Evans, which goes: “I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have the time… ” But I mean this only gently; I always look forward to reading the Tribune. How amazing to discover, as I did courtesy of the newsletter last week, that Sheffield now has a natural history museum: the passion project of a 22-year-old returnee, James Hogg (this is one of Munro’s stories and it’s delightful). And when I leave them to get on with their day – the council has responded to their claims about Park Hill and they’re good to publish at last – I can’t help but look at the city centre with fresh eyes. What’s that ugly, new building? Who uses this strange, new park? Every street has a story and I want to read them all.
