Happy birthday to us

Local Authority turns three

Tomorrow marks three years since the first edition of Local Authority. Looking back on it now, it’s kind of funny: similar to what we do now but also quite different. I don’t know how that works, but here we are.

These birthday posts have become something of a tradition here. I appreciate that not everyone is interested in these behind the curtain posts. If you’re only interested in our regular Medway news, our Tuesday briefing will be out 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.

When setting up this project, I was inspired by local news outlets trying something different by operating on a subscription model. The idea that people will pay for local journalism is a bold one in a time when so much is free, but the almighty Manchester Mill and others appeared to be finding a way to make it work. If you can offer high-quality reporting that digs a little deeper, some people will be willing to pay for it.

Of course, Medway isn’t Manchester. The two places' scale, demographics and economics are vastly different. But I decided to give it a go anyway, and now I’m writing to you three years later.

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.

Our third year has been busy:

• We’ve published 206 editions

• We moved to two weekly briefing editions each week

• We’ve broken stories on financial woes, political group turmoil, future plans for our towns, representatives getting caught out on social media, and questionable donations to Medway’s former MPs

• We’ve published more long-read journalism covering the stories and people in our towns that might be overwise overlooked

• We brought in columnists focusing on Gillingham Football Club and Medway’s music scene

• We covered a General Election and held a hustings event in each Medway constituency

• We covered a Kent Police and Crime Commissioner election and held a Medway hustings

• We held a fully booked Medway Question Time event at MidKent College

• We were nominated for Kent News Website of the Year at the Kent Press & Broadcast Awards, where I also won Highly Commended in the Kent Print & Online Journalist of the Year category

Me very awkwardly receiving an award.

I’m immensely proud of our work on Local Authority over the past year. Before we get to the numbers and what’s next, I’d like to highlight five of my favourite pieces from the past year.

Five favourite long reads from year three

We want to think we’ve published some good things over the past year. But what was the real cream of the crop? This kind of thing is very silly and a bit subjective by its nature, but we’re going to do it anyway. We’ve avoided selecting proper news stories here as they wouldn’t be timely anymore and have instead honed in on some of our longer reads from the past year.

In November, I went on a deep dive into skateboarding culture in Medway. I knew little about it, so it was fascinating to talk to local skaters and try to track their often combative relationship with Medway Council.

More annoying than dangerous

How do you even begin putting together questions for Billy Childish, a legendary Medway musician and artist with a decades-long career? It was a challenge Steven more than rose to, creating one of our best interviews of the year. They spoke for so long that we had to run a second part, too.

“I don't identify really as Billy Childish”

One of the things I love about this project is how stories can come from unexpected places. This one quite literally came from the chair of my barber, who is doing incredible work on men’s mental health.

No ordinary barber

After years of asking, we finally secured an interview with the then Rochester and Strood MP, Kelly Tolhurst, shortly before the General Election. While most media coverage with MPs means everything is reduced to a soundbite, we were able to have a proper conversation on the big issues like housing, the state of the river, Chatham Docks, and lots more.

“I'm only involved in politics because I care about my area”

Last month saw the far-right organise demonstrations across the country and, for some reason, on a dual carriageway next to a business centre in Chatham. We went along and, combined with hours of live-streamed video of the event, put together in-depth reporting on exactly what happened.

Medway on the edge

Of course, however interesting some of our pieces might be, does it really matter if no one reads them? It’s time for the numbers!

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. Three years on, we have nearly 2,300 subscribers, of which nearly 400 are paid supporters. When considering those who read on the web and formal subscribers, each briefing edition is read on average by 3,800 readers.

If we’re being honest, while our growth in paid subscribers has been solid and above average for the field we operate in, the growth in free subscribers has been slower than we would have liked. Many traditional ways to grow an email newsletter don’t apply because we are within a localised niche, so we must rely on our limited advertising budget and word of mouth. As such, please consider telling your friends and colleagues about us if you think we might be valuable to them. Word of mouth is our most reliable way of finding new readers, so it really does help.

Revenue wise, we’re doing okay. We are sustainable enough from the point of view of covering all of our core coats like running the website itself, fees and costs, basic equipment, travel, professional memberships, and that limited marketing budget. This is the first year we’ve been able to pay ourselves a (very modest) wage for the time we spend working on Local Authority. We certainly aren’t getting rich anytime soon, and we’re eager to spend more time on this and less time on our day jobs that we still have to pay the bills. We’re confident in our model and believe this is a path to sustainability for Local Authority in the medium term. But the cold, hard truth is that we need more paid supporters to do the kind of journalism we want to be doing. If you value our work and want to help us get there, please consider becoming one. As a birthday treat, we’re offering a full 25% off the annual price, so if you’ve been pondering upgrading for a while, you won’t find a better time.

As we enter year four, what does the future look like for Local Authority?

The future

In this birthday update last year, I wrote that we didn’t intend to change the core publishing schedule. Of course, we changed the core publishing schedule.

Earlier this year, we moved from one free briefing email per week to two. This allowed us to include a little more of the content that was previously behind the paywall (planning and events) in our weekly free editions and allowed more room for some arts and culture reporting that wouldn’t have previously made it into the free edition.

Most weeks, we publish four editions, including the two free briefing editions, our Sunday interview, and a long-read feature in the middle of the week. It’s not an exact schedule. Some weeks, it might be more or less, but it’s the rough guide. As the number of paid supporters grows, we should be able to stabilise that schedule further.

One thing we’re working on behind the scenes is to worry less about being fast and instead focus on covering stories well rather than quickly. We don’t envision much of a change other than our briefing editions containing more context and why something happened rather than just reporting that it happened in the first place. No one working on Local Authority is a trained journalist, so we’re doing a lot of learning by doing, so we’ll likely keep gently tweaking things as we go on.

We (thankfully) don’t appear to have any elections on the immediate horizon, so we are looking at reintroducing some live events over the next year. We’re eager to hold another Medway Question Time event, but we’ve got some other things we’re kicking around, too.

This navel-gazing post has already gone on too long, so I’ll bring it to a close here. As ever, thanks so much for reading Local Authority. I’m thrilled that so many of you have chosen to join us, and we hope you stick with us through our fourth year.

Until tomorrow.

Ed.

PS. Don’t forget that you can currently get 25% off the usual Local Authority subscription price for a full year. It’s the biggest discount we’ll offer all year, so please consider taking the plunge if you’d like to help us do even more in the coming year. Thanks!

Myself and Steven in the one vaguely acceptable photo that exists of us together