Cut to the bone

Dear Londoners — I hope you’re having a lovely last day of November. I have to admit, it feels like it’s come round pretty fast this year. I joined a year ago, and there’s not been much let up — but it’s been amazing to work on a huge range of stuff in that time. 

Last month, we passed 1,000 paying members; the kind of lovely, round-numbered milestone that made all of us very proud and very happy. We’re so grateful for the community we’re building here: for the email tips, the thoughtful comments under stories, the Instagram replies. I’ve worked for more traditional outlets before, but the close connection we have with readers at The Londoner feels utterly, thrillingly unique.

Earlier this week, I spoke at a journalism conference about the future of journalism in the UK (another thing that I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be asked to do merely a year ago). There were two interconnected topics that seemed to dominate the conversation: AI and the decline of media, particularly local media. People were gloomy, speaking of declining revenues and nervous advertisers, of redundancies and mergers and “strategic pivots”. The panel I spoke on discussed a poll of young journalists, in which respondents identified knowledge of AI and automation as one of the top skills they needed to have — and which most worried they were not proficient in. 90% viewed local media as deteriorating. All in all, the future of journalism, according to these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young reporters, was probably short form video. 

But that’s not how things look from here. At The Londoner, we’ve seen that there’s a real demand for high-quality, in-depth storytelling. For reporters that want to get to the heart of things, however tangled they are. For deeply human writing about the places, people and things that make this city what it is. 

To give some examples: our biggest “viral” moment of the year, an Instagram post that had over 1 million views, didn’t concern a scandal or big controversy. It was Katherine Swindells’ beautiful article about the workers who commute before 5am. Our most read article? One on the model railway community. We know that people want these stories — so why is the media at large not providing them?

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As always, much of the conversation is about money. The profits of the major publishers, who own most local media titles these days, are measured in millions, and their shareholders want to see those lines going up. So they cut to the bone, and then they begin sawing. The first things to go are the investigations, with their costly lawyer fees and weeks of face-to-face, on-the-ground newsgathering. Then, anything that doesn’t seem to have obvious clickbait or outrage potential, like cultural coverage, in-depth data analysis or rich, properly researched features. After all, when you can have a journalist writing 10 AI-assisted pieces on a TikTok trend or a celebrity brand endorsement, why bother to send away from the office for a single story?

But we think these stories matter. We think London deserves them. That’s why we’re so committed to bringing you investigations, features and criticism that take us huge amounts of time (weeks — sometimes months!) and resources. It’s also why we aren’t cutting, but investing.

Take, for instance, our new investigations editor, Cameron Barr. The former senior managing editor of the Washington Post, Cameron worked on the newspaper’s reporting of the Edward Snowden leaks and its many exclusives about Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. As a reporter, he’s also been on the ground finding stories around the world, including Japan and Jerusalem. Oh, and he was a finalist for a Pulitzer. No big deal, then! Now that he’s crossed the pond, Cameron is dedicated to returning local news to its rightful position at the vanguard of the country’s investigative journalism scene, and is working with The Londoner and its sister titles to fashion our most thrilling scoops.

But for this all to work — for us to prove people wrong when they claim that good local news is a relic of the past — we need your help. Our journalism is completely funded by our readers, and we don’t yet break even. The truth is, we need many more of the thousands of you who read our stories each week to support us. 

At the moment, we have around 25,000 free readers. Of them, 1,069 (exactly!) pay a little bit every month to keep the lights on, the wolf from the door, and the stories in your inbox. 

But if even a tenth of those who get us for free decided to upgrade, we’d be well on our way to a media revolution. Change doesn’t always need politicians or billionaires or private equity funding. It just needs you.