Five years of Local Authority
Five years of independent reporting on Medway, and why we need your support for the next five
Today marks five years to the day since Local Authority launched.
Five years ago, this was a slightly improvised newsletter sent to 154 people. There was no grand plan, no office, no marketing budget and no real certainty that anyone would want it.
The basic idea was simply that Medway deserved better local journalism than it was getting. Far more was happening in these towns than was being reported properly, and too much of what was covered elsewhere seemed reduced to a press release, clickbait, or whatever had kicked off on Facebook that day.
So we decided to try and build the kind of publication we wanted to read.
Five years on, Local Authority now reaches more than 3,300 subscribers, alongside many more people who find our work on the web and social media. We have published hundreds of editions, held events, launched a print edition and somehow made local council meetings a regular part of our lives.
More importantly, we have built a community of readers who care about Medway. People who want to know what is being decided in their name, what is changing in their neighbourhoods, and what is going on beyond the usual doomscrolling version of local life.
That is still what Local Authority is for.
The past year
It has been another busy year.
We have reported on some of the biggest questions facing Medway. What local government reorganisation could mean for the towns, whether the council’s Local Plan can survive the scrutiny it faces, the proposed £46m purchase of hundreds of homes, and difficult decisions around public services, fire cover, health and transport.
We have kept trying to turn complicated reports, consultations and council meetings into something that makes sense outside the room. We have asked what the promises about regeneration, growth and investment mean in practice, and followed the details that are easy to miss but often have the biggest consequences.
There have been plenty of smaller stories that matter just as much. We have covered the future of the Royal Function Rooms, the pressures facing Medway’s music scene, planning applications across the towns, changes to local high streets, and the occasionally very strange details of public life here.
Steven has continued to sit down with the people making Medway what it is: artists, community organisers, business owners, politicians and others with stories worth hearing. Our Culture Reviews, interviews, features and columns are a reminder that this place is more than its problems, even when we spend a fair bit of time writing about those too.
This year also saw us take Local Authority fully into print. The newsletter will always be at the heart of what we do, but there is something satisfying about seeing our reporting out in the world on a counter, in a café or picked up by someone who might never otherwise have come across us.
It is an attempt to reach beyond the people who already know Local Authority, and to make the case that a publication like this should be part of the life of these towns. We are still learning what the print edition can be, but we are proud of where it has started.
Some of our journalism has travelled well beyond Medway too. Our reporting on the school offering a Nigel Farage football shirt as an essay prize was picked up by national outlets. I was also honoured to be Highly Commended in the Kent Print & Online Journalist of the Year category at the Kent Press & Broadcast Awards.
Awards and national attention are gratifying, obviously, but the real value is that good local reporting can make people outside Medway pay attention to things happening here.
There is a tendency to talk about local journalism as though it is only there to expose wrongdoing. Holding power to account is essential, and it will always be central to what we do. But local journalism should also help people understand where they live, introduce them to parts of their community they might not otherwise encounter, and reflect a place back to itself.
That is the job we are trying to do.
Why it matters
It has not got any easier. Local news is in a worse state than it was five years ago, and there are fewer reporters with the time to sit through the meetings, chase the unanswered questions and make sense of complicated issues.
During Indie News Week in June, we held a panel discussion at Sun Pier House with our friends Rhys Griffiths of the Folkestone Dispatch and Christine Rayner of Bygone Kent about the state of local news and the challenges facing independent publishers. It was a candid conversation about the pressures on the sector, why this work matters, and what it takes to keep it going, which you can listen to here:
The need for this work has not gone away. If anything, it has become more urgent.
Five years in, we are still here. We are still reporting, still asking questions, still trying to make Local Authority useful, interesting and worth your time.
But we need more people who value that work to support it.
The free editions are an important part of Local Authority. We want as many people as possible to read our reporting, and we are genuinely glad you are here.
Paid subscriptions, though, allow us to do the deeper work: go beyond the press release, attend meetings, follow the paper trail, and publish stories that would otherwise not get written.
To mark our fifth birthday, we are offering our strongest paid-membership offer of the year: 40% off your first annual subscription.
That means you can get a full year of Local Authority for £36 (usually £60), which works out to 69p a week. The offer ends at midnight on Sunday 6 September, after which membership returns to its usual annual price.
If Local Authority helps you understand the place you live, and you are in a position to support it, we would genuinely love to have you with us.
One last thing: we are holding a small fifth birthday gathering for paid supporters tomorrow evening. Upgrade today, and we will send you an invitation with all the details.
Thank you for reading, sharing, replying, sending us stories and generally being part of this strange little project. It means a great deal to us.
Here is to the next five years.
Ed.
Editor
