It's our birthday and we'll post if we want to

Local Authority enters the terrible twos

Tomorrow marks the second birthday of Local Authority, so today we’re going to do our obligatory birthday post setting out how we’re doing, our current numbers, and what will be happening in the future.

As always, I appreciate not everyone is interested in this side of things. If you’re just waiting for Medway news, our usual Friday edition will be out tomorrow, but today we hope you’ll forgive me the self-indulgence.

Two years ago, I launched Local Authority at a time when local news was struggling to find a way to deliver high-quality news. If anything, things have only got worse since then. Local news websites are borderline unreadable, full of flashy adverts, pop-ups, clickbait, and endless promotions for weird weight loss products. Ad revenues in local media have utterly collapsed, and local newsrooms are trying to survive with less and less resources. A breaking point is clearly upon us, and a new way of doing things needs to be found.

My frustration with local news went back much further than the existing woes. I became increasingly frustrated that local outlets weren’t tackling the big issues facing our towns, instead churning out hastily rewritten press releases to fill copy space. Nearly a decade ago, I would be sitting in Medway Council meetings and be the only person reporting on them, and that is still often the case today.

Local Authority is an attempt to reclaim local news as a vital resource for local communities. Holding those in power to account is essential. So is simply knowing what’s happening in your community. Then there’s amplifying the kinds of voices you wouldn’t normally hear from, finding stories in underrepresented communities. All of these things have suffered in recent years, and while we may not always get it right (we’re effectively learning by doing), we’d like to think we’re doing okay.

The second year of Local Authority has been an incredible journey, where we’ve gently moved from what was effectively a one-person blog operation to a slightly (emphasis on slightly) more professional one.

We’ve tackled some big stories over the past year.

We broke how the developers of Chatham Waters were trying to dodge their obligation to build affordable homes.

We were the first to report on the seriousness of the financial problems at Medway Council.

From start to stubborn middle to finish, we covered the full saga of the aborted Great Lines Great Music Weekend festival debacle.

We continued to look at the questionable activities of Gillingham and Rainham’s MP, from his multiple Saudi-funded trips to his £17,000 second home expenses claim when he lives less than an hour from parliament.

Last month, we were named Kent News Website of the Year at the Kent Press & Broadcast Awards, something I still can’t quite get my head around. Up against ITV Meridian and KentOnline, the judges somehow decided that we were doing something more interesting. That’s an amazing feeling for us, but also a slightly damning indictment of where local news currently is when two people doing this around their main jobs are apparently more worthy than established newsrooms.

None of this is to criticise the incredibly hardworking journalists working in those newsrooms. In many cases, they will be just as frustrated about the state of things as I am. A shift away from selling newspapers to chasing elusive clicks has led to a lot of bad decisions from on high in the search for a model that works.

If you’d told me a year ago that we’d win that award, I would have laughed at you. Yet here we are.

A year ago, my old Medway politics comrade Steven Keevil came on board. Steven’s content has significantly boosted our output. He’s filed some incredible columns over this year, and you don’t just have to take my word for that. At the same awards mentioned above, he took home the award for Kent Columnist of the Year, which is an outstanding achievement. In recent months, Steven has been focused on driving our Sunday interview series, which has been a big hit with readers.

We’d like to think our output has improved over this past year, offering more coverage, more perspectives, and more insight into the way our towns work.

But what do the cold hard numbers say?

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 do so.

When Local Authority launched, it was sent to 154 subscribers. Two years on, we have nearly 1,500 subscribers, of which around 260 are paid supporters. Each main Friday edition, when taking into account those who read on the web as well as formal subscribers, is read on average by 2,300 readers.

Revenue wise, we’re doing okay, but not amazingly. Local Authority has grown enough to cover all of its core costs (website stuff, fees and costs, equipment, marketing etc), which is brilliant. What it still isn’t doing is paying us any kind of salary to work on it beyond token amounts to cover expenses and the such. We’re fairly confident of our model, and we do believe this is a path to sustainability for Local Authority in the medium term. But if you enjoy what we do and would like to help us get there faster, please consider becoming a paid supporter. 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.

Growth this year has been solid, with a fairly steady flow of new subscribers joining us throughout the year. In an increasingly desolate social media hellscape, word of mouth has become more important for our growth. Please consider sharing Local Authority with your friends, family, and even enemies.

Now, as we enter our third year, what does the future look like for Local Authority?

The future

We’re not changing our core content strategy for now. Three editions each week is the most we can manage all the time this isn’t our main job. So the free Friday edition for everyone will continue on for everyone, with most of our other output either fully or partially locked behind the paywall.

Obviously, we’d love to make all of our work available for free, but the economics of this project only really work under this model. We think it’s a fair compromise. The main Friday news is available for free to anyone that wants it, while more in-depth interviews, essays, planning reports, event guides, and lots more are available to our paid supporters.

Earlier this year, we ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to improve our output. That funding has already helped fund some professional memberships which give us appropriate support for what we do, as well as access to various training and resources, which we are now working our way through. We are in the process of seeking out the equipment that we need to both improve our current workflow and also allow us to experiment with more media content. As we enter autumn, we intend to start commissioning pieces from other writers, allowing us to cover issues and stories we wouldn’t normally be able to ourselves. We’ll have more to share on the process for pitching and commissioning stories soon.

The funding also allowed us to begin a series of live events, starting with our Medway Question Time series. MQT brings together residents and those with power or interesting perspectives to ask about the big questions facing our towns. Our first event took place at MidKent College last month, and our next edition, focused on the Hoo Peninsula, is coming up soon, so please book a free ticket if you’d like to join us for that.

None of this would have been possible without our generous crowdfunding supporters. If you were one of them, we can’t thank you enough. By now you should have received any rewards you were eligible for, but if you haven’t, please drop us an email via hello@localauthority.news and we’ll sort you out.

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 third 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!

Footnotes

We love to hear from readers of this thing, and you can always contact us by hitting reply on any edition or emailing hello@localauthority.news. We try and reply to everything. Alternatively, the comments on this edition are open so if you’ve got any comments, feedback, or ideas for this newsletter, feel free to drop them there.

Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: Doom Singer by Chris Farren, Johnny Foreigner vs Everything by Johnny Foreigner.