Here's to the future

Hello, Hannah here. If we haven’t met before, I’m the editor of The Londoner — lovely to finally meet you. It’s the tail-end of our first summer at The Londoner HQ, and I wanted to write to you about what’s been both an extremely fun and incredibly intense season: uncovering the billionaire landlord shutting down the capital’s pubs, going deep on the bizarre drama behind the closure of the east end’s most radical bookshop, attending the Afro-Caribbean festival thrown by TfL’s bus drivers. We’ve had culture editions and long reads and snappy explainers and, despite their variety, what unites all of these pieces is their ability to transport you: to illuminate the places, characters and goings-on in this city that you never knew existed. Until now.

And yet. At the time of writing this, I’m sitting in an empty newsroom, furiously working my way through an endlessly growing pile of unanswered correspondence and unfiled documents. As I do this, the counter on my Gmail inbox climbs higher and higher, while my Slack notifications chirp maniacally every few seconds. I’m also alone. After months of ceaseless hard work, Andrew has taken his legally and contractually mandated leave — the nerve! — and left me without a single staff writer.

Although journalism’s golden age is, undoubtedly, long since past (personally, the death of the editor’s champagne trolley is the lost convention that hits hardest), a previous job at a legacy media outlet did come with the perks of a sparkling water tap and a Japanese robot toilet. There are, I’m afraid to say, no such luxuries at The Londoner towers. We share our premises with a think tank, and are huddled away in an attic room — a garret, if you’re feeling particularly romantic. There’s something appropriately Dickensian about the whole thing, or a little Thomas Chatterton, if he’d been addicted to high-quality local journalism instead of opium. It also gets very hot in warm weather and — because this is London, after all — you can’t open the window without hearing the extremely noisy building work happening across the street. The glamour!

But I’m not pining for the slick, glass-walled offices and complementary fruit baskets of other London publications. Rather, I’m proud of our scrappiness, of our shoestring budget, of our ability to get things done, despite our tiny resources. And that’s because I believe that The Londoner’s minuscule staff, with help from a small team of talented freelancers, has delivered some of the best journalism and writing the capital has seen for decades (and truthfully, the robot toilet freaked me out).

Our mission — our gamble, really — to provide high-quality local journalism to London is paying off. We’re dedicated to producing work that’s gripping, dramatic and fun, while remaining wedded to our lodestars of hard work and diligence. It’s this unique mix that makes me suspect we’ll continue to entertain and illuminate our readers (and irritate those in power) for quite some time.

But I’ll be honest with you: it’d be nice to have a little breathing room now and again. We have so many stories we want to tell about this incredible, gigantic city, but often simply don’t have the time or resources. There’s only one way to grow and establish ourselves for the long term: recruit more paying subscribers. These are the hero Londoners who can glimpse what we’re trying to do here, and are backing us to grow and do more of it.

But that’s not to say we don’t value our free subscribers. There’s room for everybody, even if you’re with us just for our mini-briefings, Monday editions and free stories. And whether you pay for The Londoner or not, we’re beyond grateful every time you forward one of our pieces when it lands in your inbox, or share links on social media, or recommend us to a friend.

I think we already have a great relationship with our audience. I love reading the comment sections under our pieces, as well as the emails you guys send me with tips and feedback. But I want us — readers and journalists, you and I — to build it into an institution that the whole city (and all 8.9 million people in it) gets to know, trust and enjoy. In short, I want us all to be able to feel pride in how London’s stories are being told.

I think what we offer is already great value for money. I also know that times are a little hard right now. But if you can — and if you believe that the capital deserves high-quality coverage — it’s just £4.95 a month for the first three months. Our next major milestone is to get to 1,000 paying subscribers. At the moment, we’re around 200 off. Getting there would send a big signal about the kind of journalism London wants and what it’s willing to get behind. 

So if you’ve been impressed by the thoroughness of our recent investigations, or enjoyed the immersive prose of our features, I’d like you to consider becoming one of that 200. With your support, we can keep chipping away at bigger stories and taking on the rich and powerful who want to keep their activities in London on the down low. There’s a whole lot more out there that has never been reported on. Let’s see what we can really do.