Four years in
Where we're at and where we're going
Local Authority turns four this week. In that time, we’ve grown from 154 subscribers to nearly 3,000, broken stories that have changed how Medway is run, and built a community of people who care about their towns. It hasn’t been easy, but the fact that we’re still here and publishing three or four times a week is something worth celebrating.
I appreciate that not everyone is interested in these behind the curtain posts. If you’re only interested in our regular Medway news, our Friday culture briefing will be along tomorrow as usual.
I do hope you’ll forgive a certain amount of self-indulgence today, though. I’d like to talk about our past year, share some numbers with you, highlight some of my favourite stories from the past year, and ponder what comes next.
The reasons behind Local Authority haven’t changed. I started this project because local news was in a troubling state. Sadly, things have only got worse since then, with newsrooms cutting jobs across the country and local news being reduced to typing up press releases and covering the most mundane of local issues. That’s without even mentioning how most local news websites are almost unreadable these days, with readers being barraged by ads and self-reloading pages, making it difficult to follow anything.
Local Authority is an attempt to reclaim local news as a vital resource for local communities. Holding those in power to account is essential, as is simply knowing what’s happening in your community. Then there’s amplifying the kinds of voices you wouldn’t normally hear from and finding stories in underrepresented communities. All of these things have suffered in recent years, and while we may not always get it right, we’d like to think we’re doing okay. I recently sat down with the Press Gazette to talk about what we’ve done here.
If you’ve enjoyed our reporting, now is the moment to help secure its future. Paid subscribers make Local Authority possible, and right now you can get a full year for 25% off, less than £1 a week.
Our fourth year has been busy:
We’ve published 213 editions
We’ve consistently published two briefing editions, one on proper news, and one on what’s happening culturally, each week.
We’ve broken stories on Medway Council selling off significant amounts of property, the absurd situation of Sport England objecting to redevelopment of an inaccessible playing field, Tonbridge and Malling building temporary housing on Medway’s border, how crime is actually falling in Medway, swimming instructors being made redundant, beef between Medway Council and the Gillingham Street Angels, the abandoning of the Innovation Park project after £33m was spent, the problems at Medway Community Healthcare, the future of Medway under local government organisation, Medway finally delivering a Local Plan, and how Medway Council collected over £2m of traffic fines in one year.
We’ve put out some great features on subjects like what it’s like to live on St. Mary’s Island, life drawing in Rochester, the Shorts Tunnels, and ongoing looming of the Spembley building over the Chatham skyline.
We’ve published interviews with a wide ranging of Medway figures like Medway Council leader Vince Maple, Chatham Memorial Synagogue Chair Dalia Halpern-Matthews, Medway Council Chief Executive Richard Hicks, Mrs Sourdough Katalin Takács, director Francis Annan, Gillingham and Rainham MP Naushabah Khan, atomic archaeologist Vicky Robinson, Chatham Dockyard Chief Executive Richard Morseley, Reform leader David Finch, Drag Race legend River Medway, and local journalist Steven Keevil.
We published regular columns focusing on Gillingham Football Club, Medway’s music scene, and volunteering in our towns
We covered three Medway by-elections that saw Reform taking their first seats on Medway Council
We held another well-attended Medway Question Time event at MidKent College
We were nominated for Kent News Website of the Year at the Kent Press & Broadcast Awards, as well as Kent Print & Online Journalist of the Year
Finally, we launched the Kent Current, looking at the wider county of Kent
Local Authority in numbers
Since launch, we have been open about this project and the figures behind the scenes that show how we’re doing, and we’ll continue to be so.
When Local Authority launched, it was sent to 154 subscribers. Four years on, we have nearly 3,000 subscribers, of which nearly 450 are paid supporters. When considering those who read on the web and formal subscribers, each briefing edition is read on average by 4,000 readers.
To be quite honest, we’ve hit something of a wall this year. While our growth through the second half of 2024 was okay, it has stagnated through 2025, with us still having roughly the same number of paying subscribers as we did at the start of the year. We’ve proved there’s an appetite for what we do, but to keep it sustainable, we need more people to back us. Three, sometimes four, editions each week takes a lot of time and effort, and perhaps more challenging, even if we can deliver them, we can’t spend the sort of time on them we’d like.
Unfortunately, that puts us in an awkward position where enough people support this project to make it somewhat viable, but not enough to keep putting out the amount we are. To be blunt, if we can’t get the number of paying subscribers back on track, we’re going to likely have to reduce our output a little, which will most likely see the Friday culture edition either scrapped or made more occasional and some other juggling of the schedule. We really like having the Friday edition as part of our output, highlighting people doing interesting things across our towns, but it’s also the most complex to put together for the smallest return. Our news briefings, interviews, and features won’t go anywhere, but we’ll need to look at what remains viable.
So today, we are making a plea that if you enjoy our work and don’t currently pay to support it, this is the time we really need a few more people to step up. To sweeten the deal a little, we’re offering 25% off the regular price for an entire year, meaning you can support our work for as little as 87p per week. Becoming a paid subscriber doesn’t just support our journalism, it makes you part of a community of people who care about these towns we call home.
If you are already a paying subscriber, we remain incredibly grateful for your support. Local news isn’t the most natural thing to pay for, so the fact that you have enough faith in us and believe it’s worth supporting means a lot.
Whether you’re a paying subscriber or not, one of the biggest things you can do to help us is to tell someone about us. We have no meaningful marketing budget, so we rely on word of mouth and social media shares for people to hear about us. We have a referral scheme that means you can get a paid subscription for free if you send just two new readers our way, and if you find ten, we’ll send you a tote bag. You can get the full details of the scheme here.
We held a birthday party
We aren’t usually ones for big celebrations, but last month we held a fourth anniversary event at Sun Pier House for our paying subscribers, contributors, and friends. It was great to see so many people turn out to celebrate with us.
The incredibly talented Suze Cooper spent the evening talking to people about why they subscribe to and value Local Authority, and I’m not going to lie, listening to them might have brought a little tear to my eye. I remain forever grateful for the generous, kind, and engaged community that we’ve managed to build around this new way of doing local news.
Thanks to Mike Evans, Wendy Daws, Carl Jeffrey, Erica Jones, Bryan Fowler, Anne-Marie Jordan, James O’Malley, Cazz Wrate, Phil Quinn, Shea Coffey, and Vince Maple for speaking so kindly about us.
The future
We’re definitely not going anywhere. We still believe in this project, and it is somewhat sustainable. Not enough for it to be our full-time jobs, but it does enough to keep itself going, even if we might need to make some tweaks like we set out above.
Our aim for the coming year is to get back to writing more long-read pieces. The briefings are an essential part of what we do. A core news briefing will always be part of our mix, but we want to start focusing more on the big issues and stop trying to cover absolutely everything. As a primarily two-person operation, it turns out that’s a lot to keep on top of. In the four years we’ve been going, the mix of content we put out has changed, largely to add more and more. We’ll still publish at least three editions in a week, but we might need to mix up what is in them a little to take on a quality over quantity approach. Steven is also working on a new concept that combines deep dives into big issues and in-person live events, and we can’t wait to share more with you about that soon.
Thanks again to everyone who has read, commented, shared, got in touch with stories, taken out a paying subscription, and made this a lovely thing to be doing.
Here’s to the next four years.
Ed.
PS. Don’t forget that you can currently get 25% off the usual Local Authority subscription price for a year. It’s the biggest discount we offer, but it’s only available for a short time, so please consider taking the plunge if you’d like to help us keep doing what we do for another year. Thanks!
The amount of work you guys put into this is incredible. You deserve way more subscribers.
Thank you Ed and Steven, I hope things improve.
It's a phenomenal achievement. Happy birthday, LA. I, for one, would understand if you reduced the number of newsletters. The cultural ones are much appreciated, as someone involved in the literary scene. But if they need to be less frequent, so be it. Already subscribe to both LA and KC, but will do what I can to spread the word.