2024 in Local Authority
A look back at our year and where we're heading
As we reach the end of the year, we’re breaking with the normal format of these newsletters to do a quick roundup of the state of Local Authority. I hope you’ve all had a restful festive period and hopefully didn’t have your dog poo in the middle of the living room minutes after your parents arrived to visit, as I got to experience.
We’re taking a small break from our regular news schedule through Christmas. We’ll be back properly next week, but I’d like to look back at the past year, share our latest stats with you, and talk briefly about what comes next.
I appreciate that not everyone is interested in the behind the scenes side of how this project works, and if that’s you, you can safely skip this edition. But since I launched Local Authority, I’ve made a commitment to talk openly about how things work and be transparent about the numbers behind it.
So if you’re okay with a bit of navel-gazing, let’s go for it.
With our final edition of the year on Sunday, Local Authority will have published 223 editions this year. That’s a lot and rather more than the 175 editions we published in 2022. Around 100 of those will have been our free weekly briefing editions, with the rest made up of our weekly interviews, features, and columns that we publish to our paid supporters.
January was fairly quiet this year, though one of our big stories of the year came this month after we broke the news that a Medway Council Cabinet member was using anonymous social media accounts to push political talking points. Of course, nothing happened as a result.
Politics dominated February, with Medway Council’s budget, resignations and suspensions flying thick and fast.
In March, we held our second reader survey to understand who chooses to read this thing. In it, we discovered that the average reader is still a straight pensioner with a degree who lives in Rochester and most likely votes Labour, which may or may not surprise you. We’ll conduct another survey next year to see how things have changed over the past twelve months.
March was also the month we moved to publishing two briefing editions each week, with the Tuesday edition focusing on the big political and important stories of the week and the Friday one leaning into arts and culture within our towns. We’re still gently tweaking the balance, but we are happy with this as a way of covering the different parts of Medway we want to write about.
In April, we continued our commitment to holding election debates by putting on Medway’s only Police and Crime Commissioner debate. All three candidates agreed to participate in the event, which saw around 100 people come to MidKent College to listen to them debate. Getting people engaged with local democracy like this remains difficult, but we are proud that we continue to put on events that do draw in a cross-section of the local community.
May saw the Police and Crime Commissioner election itself, and being a county-wide election, we had to leave our comfort zone and travel to Gravesham for the count, where Matthew Scott was re-elected for his third term in the role.
Later that month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak suddenly decided to call an election for July, giving us roughly six weeks to assemble all of our coverage. We immediately launched into a programme of interviews with as many candidates as possible, interviewing representatives from the Conservatives, Labour, Greens, Lib Dems, and Reform.
As we entered June, just over a week after the General Election was called, we hastily arranged three election hustings, one for each Medway constituency. Most candidates agreed to participate, with just the Conservatives and one Reform candidate not participating. The events exceeded our expectations, with over 550 Medway residents coming along across the three events and over 150 questions being submitted.
July saw the General Election itself, where all three Medway seats fell to Labour as they swept to victory across the country. We spent all night at Medway Park running a live feed of results for readers, meaning Local Authority subscribers were the first to know what had happened here in Medway.
We were also back at the Kent Press & Broadcast Awards, a consistently enjoyable event, where we were nominated for two awards. We didn’t win Kent News Website of the Year this year following our 2023 win, but I was honoured to be named Highly Commended in the Kent Print & Online Journalist of the Year category.
August saw a wave of far-right marches across the country, and inevitably, one popped up in Medway. It didn’t turn into much, more of a stand off across a dual-carriageway between protestors and anti-racism activists, but our coverage did lead to our most read feature of the year. It’s probably the story I’m most proud to have written this year, put together from on the ground reporting and trawling through hours of live video streams from the event.
News dominated September, and our feature on how crime is actually falling in Medway, contrary to popular belief, became one of our most read pieces of the year.
We broke the biggest story of the year for us in October when we revealed that Medway Council were planning to sell off Temple Manor, Gillingham Business Park, Rainham Shopping Centre, and 27 other properties.
October was pretty weird for me, too. I was invited to speak at Goldsmiths, University of London, about our work on Local Authority and the wider local journalism ecosystem.
November saw the local news agenda in Medway start to be dominated by rumblings that the new government wanted to reorganise the way local government worked. As a result, we dived into the issue, pondering whether an elected Mayor for Kent and Medway was on the way.
As ever, December has been a fairly quiet month. While it has chugged along nicely news wise, it has allowed us a little bit of breathing room to wind down ahead of Christmas and recharge heading into next year.
There are loads more things I could include here, but I can only push my luck with so many greatest hits of the year before it becomes far too self-indulgent.
Local Authority stats
Assemble, stats nerds. Here are our latest figures, which are part of our ongoing commitment to transparency about this project's performance.
At the start of the year, roughly 3,200 readers read our free briefing editions. That number has now grown to an average of 5,900 readers each week. We’ve seen large growth in the number of readers of our free articles on the web, even as direct subscription growth has been steady.
At the start of the year, we had around 1,600 subscribers who chose to receive our articles straight into their inbox and 300 paid supporters. We currently have around 2,400 subscribers who receive these dispatches by email, with around 420 paid supporters.
We’re fairly happy with those figures, particularly the ratio of paid supporters to free subscribers. Convincing readers to actively subscribe to receive news, let alone pay for it, remains a challenge, but we can’t complain.
We beat our (fairly modest) revenue target this year. We are now in a position where all direct costs (hosting, fees etc) are covered, we can have a small marketing budget, as well as pay ourselves a modest sum for some of the time we spend working on Local Authority. It’s still not exactly a full wage, but it is more than we could manage previously.
Twenty most read news briefings this year:
Gillingham Street Angels accuse Medway Council of making their work harder
Sport England objects to housing to protect inaccessible playing field
Frindsbury ‘misery’ finally arrives, brings out worst in everyone again
Medway’s new traffic cameras already issuing thousands of fines
Medway Council Cabinet member uses anonymous account to push political points
Ten most read features:
Ten most read interviews:
Where we’re going
So what does Local Authority look like in 2025?
To be honest, not that different to how it is now. We have roughly hit the limits of what we can do in terms of the level of content, with two free editions and two paid editions each week. As always, the challenge remains to make those editions as good as possible.
We have some fascinating stories in the pipeline for the new year, some of which have taken a long time to come together fully. Elsewhere, Steven has lined up a brilliant list of future interviewees, and has been following up on some great stories on his Friday arts and culture beat. We’ll continue to have guest writing from our music columnist, Stephen Morris, and our Gills columnist, Ben Hopkins. We’re also aiming to have writing from one or two new faces too, and we can’t wait to share more about that.
With no election on the horizon (hopefully!), we shouldn’t have to arrange any election debates this year. We do want to continue our series of live events though, so we will be looking to put something on once we get into the new year. We keep saying we’d like to put on some occasional social events for our paid supporters too, and I think this is the year we’ll finally manage to do it.
Otherwise, we will keep doing what we can to make this Medway’s definitive local news service. We remain limited by time as we work this project around our day jobs, so please consider becoming a paid supporter if you can help us thrive.
Right now, we are currently offering 20% off an annual subscription to Local Authority. I know it’s a costly time for many, but if you are in a position to support our work and want to help us hit the ground running in 2025, please consider becoming a paid supporter.
As ever, thank you so, so much for reading this thing. It’s been three and a half years, and I’m still amazed that Local Authority is now an award-winning website with thousands of readers. It means so much that you’re here reading, subscribing, sharing, commenting, and sending us news, and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.
Ed
Editor, Local Authority
Footnotes
Sunday will be our final edition of the year, a special interview edition where we catch up with some of our past guests to hear about their year and what’s ahead for 2025. We’ll be off on Tuesday, with the regular publishing schedule resuming on Friday 6 January.
If you enjoy Local Authority, please consider telling someone about it, sharing it on your social media, or becoming a paid supporter if you haven’t already.
We love to hear from readers. You can always contact me by hitting reply on any newsletter or emailing hello@localauthority.news - we try to reply to everything.
Music that soundtracked the creation of this newsletter: Bringing the Backline by Trust Fund, Impeccable Blahs by Say Hi, and Loner by Caroline Rose.
Thanks Ed. LA has been a touchstone amidst the flim-flam. Truly appreciated.