Local Authority has a new home
We’ve moved, but nothing should change for most of you.
A quick update: Local Authority has now moved off Substack and onto a new home powered by Ghost. You don’t need to resubscribe, you don’t need to change anything, and your newsletters should keep arriving exactly as before. If you’re a paying supporter, your subscription has been transferred automatically and will still cost the same as before.
So why make this move at all?
In short: stability, independence and fairness. Ghost is a non-profit platform built specifically for reader-funded publications. No corporate investors, no push toward social-media-style feeds, no promotional emails you didn’t sign up for. Just a solid, simple publishing platform.
We also reached the end of the road with two long-running Substack issues. First, the platform has moved away from what worked for us, increasingly introducing social features that work well for some, but don't for local news publishers.
Second, the platform forced us to start accepting subscriptions via users of the Substack app on Apple devices, with a 30% surcharge on subscriptions. That left us with an impossible choice to make: Apple users pay 30% more for the exact same journalism, or absorb the 30% hit ourselves. Neither felt fair to readers nor sustainable for an independent newsroom.
Ghost lets us avoid all of that. Your money goes further. Your emails should arrive more reliably, and we’re not at the mercy of someone else’s algorithm or app store rules.
If you want to leave comments on articles, you can log in using the same email address you originally signed up with. We’ve already moved your account. If you just want to receive the emails and never visit the site, that’s fine too. You’re already set.
To mark the move, we’re also offering new subscribers 25% off a full year of Local Authority access. If you’ve been thinking about supporting our work, now’s a particularly good moment, and it makes a real difference to what we can do going into 2026.
The journalism stays exactly the same. The website will look a little different while we settle in, but the briefings, interviews and features you signed up for won’t change.
Thank you for reading, for supporting independent reporting in Medway, and for sticking with us. We couldn’t do this without you.
Ed
Editor, Local Authority
