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Local features work
LONDON FREELANCE Branch hosted Joshi Herrmann, the founder of Mill Media, on 10 June. Mill Media has been described by John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter, at the Financial Times, as one of the most interesting and impressive media start-ups of the last decade. It has received investment from CNN CEO and former BBC Director General Sir Mark Thompson. It publishes high-quality local journalism in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield - and, soon, London and Glasgow.
Founded by Joshi (pronounced Yoshi) as a local newsletter covering Greater Manchester, after just four years the Mill employs 11 staff writers and editors and is read by more than 100,000 email subscribers, funded by 7500 paying members as well as corporate sponsorship.
Joshi Herrmann on Zoom
Joshi Herrman: I started the Mill four years ago in Manchester – when it was just me writing a newsletter.
I chose to focus on the kind of journalism that I'd been doing in my career at that point.
I had worked at the Evening Standard and freelanced for various titles, where I tended to write features and longer stories – so I thought I would try a version of local journalism that was less about “news”, which I think we have too much of in our mix in UK media, and instead focused on features, which I find vastly under-represented in UK journalism.
The journalism I most enjoy reading is American-style magazine journalism. I feel it gives a sense of depth and nuance and thoughtfulness about the topic. Also, I think a big part of journalism should be giving people a sense of delight and entertainment and a sense of emotional connection to the place they live, or the world that they're living in. I don't think you can achieve so much with factual news journalism.
I think we're on to a good thing. I think people do really want high-quality journalism about the places they live.
But I think the local press is in the state that it's in because the companies that own local media in this country have precipitated, or overseen, a general decline in quality. They've laid off a lot of journalists, as you know, and they have stopped publishing a lot of different forms of journalism. There used to be book reviews and features and opinion in local newspapers.
So, the Mill are trying to offer something different. So far, there's been a good reception. There are 100,000 people on our free email lists across our four cities.
Nika Talbot: So much of media is trying to do too many things across too many platforms – so there's something to be said for going deep and choosing one thing, such as your newsletter, having a target of doing deep reporting and good storytelling. It pays off rather than trying to do podcasts and videos and all the rest of it.
Joshi: It's funny that you said that because I gave an interview a couple of days ago in which that was my main point. I think the media companies have been pulled in so many directions by the internet. Companies that used to publish a newspaper every day are now doing things on TikTok and Instagram and they're doing Facebook live videos and they're trying to do podcast series. The advantage we have is that we have a very simple model.
So, if you're a reader of ours in Manchester and you're not paying, you'll get two editions from us full of journalism; and if you pay, you'll get four.
Ninety-five percent of our revenue comes from paying subscribers, and that pays for all our costs. The kind of stories we do are very varied: you never know what you're going get. One day it will be a deep dive into local politics in Manchester; a few days later it might be a very successful chicken shop that's taken off, or the Muslim subculture around a particular place. A couple of days later there might be an ethical data piece about why Manchester never got an underground network when other cities did.
I try to keep it incredibly eclectic because I think we’re not going to be able to cover any one topic in detail week after week. We try to pick out four stories every week that we think are interesting.
Instead of asking my writers to write three or four things a day, I ask them to write one story a week. And it's generally 1000, 2000 or 3000 words, so they have a very different, remit and that really helps us. We’ve published freelance stories in all our titles, though most of our stories are by staff writers – I'd say every month on each of our titles we publish three or four freelance stories.
The Mill is coming to London
We’re launching a London title next. We’re hoping it will be later this year, so I'm seeking commissions. I'd love people here to pitch. At www.millmediaco.uk/write you'll find a Google form where you can fill in the details of your pitch.
Tim Gopsill: If you are a nationwide operation then there’s quite an interesting similarity with the Byline network. What will the differences be between you and them?
Joshi: I don't read the Byline network enough to lay out the differences very clearly. I think they probably do a little more opinion than we do. I'm very allergic to opinion journalism. Nothing against the columnists in the room, if there are any, but I think British media have become totally overtaken by hot takes and op-eds.
This whole thing of a set word rate has obviously encouraged people to write the thing that they can do in two hours rather than the thing they would do in two months. I think we've got a huge problem in British journalism of not having enough quality writing and too much opinion. So we don't do that.
There are loads of outlets that try to do local journalism in different ways. I thought right at the beginning that if I want people to pay for local news, after they've had 20 years of local news for free, you must make what you produce feel totally different. That's why I went for the long-reads approach because I asked myself – how am I going persuade people that this is totally different?
And I don't think of the Mill as a national. All our titles are local.
I believe in covering cities. Cities are an incredibly important part of the modern world and I think people who live in them tend to know very little about the people who live in the next neighbourhood or the people who live in the next street, so I think it's very important to build connections and solidarity between people by doing high-quality journalism that covers the places they live.
Stand by your freelances
Pennie Quinton: Do you as publisher take responsibility for legal liability for a freelance’s work? If there are any legal issues, how do you deal with that?
Joshi: We defend stories if someone's suing us – not that I've never had a legal threat relating to a story written by a freelance.
When we're threatened, we tell claimants that we will be defending the claim. I've never known a claimant to say, well, we're going to go after the writer individually. We have a regular lawyer and legal advisers. I hope never to have to go to the High Court in a defamation case – but if we did of course we would defend a piece by freelance in the same way we would defend a piece written by a staff writer.
Photography
Hazel Dunlop: What's your policy with regards to photographs?
Joshi: When I started out, my first staff writer, Danny, was also an amazing photographer. Then we started occasionally paying a photographer if they were working on a story. We don't pay for a lot of photography. We have a Getty subscription that gets us our basic stuff and then we have reporters take some photos when they're out working.
It's an area that we don't do a lot of. Perhaps that's to do with budget, or maybe it's to do with the fact that my background is more writing. I did get an email from a former Fleet Street picture editor a couple of days ago who loved one of our titles and said he'd like to help us develop our visual side.
It's an area we want to improve and to make our news a bit more visual.
Community
Nika: How are you building community? Do you have a reader mail bag, and what's the correspondence like between you and the readers? Do they give you stories?
Joshi: Readers do give us stories, which is nice, but the biggest thing is that they give us a lot of encouragement. We get a lot of emails saying: “We like what you're doing” and “you should think about talking to this person.”
The Mill had a fourth birthday party last week. Our longest-serving members, who've been paying for a long time, came along and a big theme of the night was how nice the community is.
When I worked for the Evening Standard I'd write my piece and I'd go on the underground to see whether anyone was reading it, watching over people's shoulders to see if they're reading it – there really wasn't much interaction with readers. Now with our more successful stories you'll have dozens of comments. You have a real sense of community. People are talking to each other. and at these events they've got to know each other. The community aspect has probably been the biggest surprise of all.
I believed that the journalism could work out but I didn't realize how much it would mean to people and how much that feeling part of something would mean to people. I think journalism isn't just about giving people information, it's also about creating a sense of connection between people via the journalism.
Pennie Quinton: Are you paying moderators to deal with trolling and things like that? I was wondering how you manage people abusing the space.
Joshi: That problem has never arisen. I don't know why media companies allow people who don't pay to comment because obviously you need people who've got a certain level of engagement.
The only people we allow to comment are paying subscribers – and people only pay for this kind of thing if they love it and they feel very positively towards it. It's unusual to have a negative comment about a story, let alone a toxic, malevolent troll or anything like that, it just doesn't happen. It's unbelievably positive.
It's difficult building up a new media company, it takes a lot of work and there are a lot of difficult moments along the way – but the thing that's often got me through is the comments and the people who get in touch and say “keep soldiering on” – this is why we love doing it.
I wish there were a lot more local players in this new world of more innovative local news. because of the number of jobs being lost in conventional local news. Reach plc cut 850 roles last year.
The Press Gazette estimated that the number of local journalists employed by the large local media companies is down from 9000 to 3000 since 2007 – that's a cataclysmic drop.
So many jobs have been lost that you need an awful lot of innovation and new models to build up local journalism again. I sometimes go to local news websites and see stories that are clearly just a press release from the council, then a press release from the police, and then a press release from a local company. They are not building value in their media brands. Banging out lots of press releases is a very uncertain way to build a brand that people will pay for and stick around for in the long term.
How the Mill pays its contributors
We don't have a standard word rate because different types of stories require such different amounts of work. Standard word rates reward stories that are fast to write and don't properly pay for stories that take lots of reporting. On our website we give examples of what the lowest end of the spectrum would be: for a theatre review we might pay £150 to £170 – we've done lots of that kind of commissioning over the past few years.
If there's a story about a particular neighbourhood or a controversy that involves speaking to a few people but doesn't take loads and loads of digging, we might pay £300. We have a much larger budget for stories that are incredibly complicated and take loads of work, that involve going to court or writing a really long piece. We can pay up to £2500 for, let's say, 5000 words of that kind.
I really don't believe in just having one rate per word because I've done that in my, in career and it doesn't work. I've written for the Guardian, the Times, the Evening Standard, the Independent and the Spectator. The idea that journalists should be paid one fixed amount per word when some things involve three months of work is utter nonsense.
In America, they wouldn't go for that, which is why they've got a good long-form journalism culture. They decide a story, they offer a writer a fee and if it's acceptable to the writer then they go ahead with the commission. In the UK, we've got this bizarre situation where there’s the same word rate, regardless of how much work the piece takes.
And I think that's why we've ended up with this cesspit of opinion writing: hot take after hot take – because hot takes take an hour and the kind of stories we're trying to commission take a lot longer than an hour.
Inclusive
Mariam Elsayeh: Would you welcome pitches from non-native English journalists, whose English might not be good but who specifically offer insights on for example migrant and asylum-seekers' stories, even though their pieces may need to be heavily edited?
Joshi: Definitely. I can't think of a story that we've done with a refugee, but we ran a very powerful story by a 16-year-old girl who'd grown up in very tough circumstances in West Yorkshire. I paired her up with one of our staff writers: she gave all the material and then the writer shaped it. It turned into a successful story. even though the 16-year-old’s writing obviously wasn't up to the standard that we would normally have.
I would be open to that kind of innovation. I couldn't really promise how well that would work but would be very keen to innovate different ways to try that kind of thing. I often pair someone outside with a staff writer to get things into our style.
There was a story by four students at the University of Manchester during the pandemic called “The social experiment: our student life in the pandemic”.
They obviously did all the reporting, but I paired them up with one of our team to pull it into our style because ultimately when you're a 21-year-old journalist, who's been writing for the student paper, you probably won't quite have that long-form style down.
It turned out to be one of the most interesting stories we've done because we're totally in the world of those young people whom we don't normally find out what they were doing during the pandemic or what they were thinking.
From the floor: What mostly do you pay your staff writers?
Joshi: We have staff prices for journalists working in places like Manchester and Liverpool who are two years into their career, and they earn £25,000 which is around what they would earn at local newspapers, slightly more in some cases.
We have people who've been in journalism for ten years who are earning £35,000, up to £40,000. So it depends massively on experience. We've been based in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield where salaries tend to be a bit lower and where living costs are gigantically lower than in London. I think we're going to have to pay a little more for our team in London. I always want to pay people more than we do.
When I started out on my own, we didn't have any investment. Our first ever staff writer joined us straight out of university and she earned something like £18,000, and it was just me and her sitting in a room and, that's all I could afford. She moved up and then other people joined on a little bit more, and now I feel we've got to the point where we're paying the equivalent to what Reach would pay for a similar person who's been out of university for two years.
I don't know why Reach, which is listed on the Stock Exchange and makes a hundred million pounds, can't pay a little bit more – but we've tried to edge up what we're paying. I hope in future that we'll be able to pay people more than we are paying now.
A huge problem in local news is that a lot of people have left their jobs, mainly going into PR – because once they decide to have kids or they decide to buy a house, or they have anything happening in their life, they can't afford to live on local journalism salaries any more.
I want to get to the point in future, when we're a larger company, that we're known for paying really fairly and really well. I’ve posted jobs on my Twitter account and on our website, a whole range of jobs from staff writers to editors to social media, and the salary range is between £25,000 and £50,000.
From the floor: As you're moving in to London, how can you define the line between the political and international and the local news in London? For example with the marches, or what's going on in London politically?
Joshi: The story of British news is that most of it is produced in London but very little of it consistently covers London. Even the London Evening Standard decided to take “London” out of the name of the paper – and it now seems to have a much more national focus. I don't understand that. London is one of the most important cities in the world; but what happens in London is also local.
There are neighbourhood stories in London. There are stories of different immigrant communities in London. There are stories about political malpractice and housing in London. I don't think everyone who works in London in journalism needs to be looking at the global and the national and I don't understand why they do. We've got an incredibly national based media. We've never had a strong regional media compared to our national media, compared to the US.
‘London has loads of unbelievable stories’
I won't be tempted to cover global stories or stories about big themes that don't relate to people in London. London is a city like anywhere else. It's a locality like anywhere else. It has loads of unbelievable stories that, when I was on the London Evening Standard, we didn't cover because we wanted to be seen as a as a national newspaper as well as a local one. I'm not saying we didn't do good journalism in London, but there's a lot of stuff we didn't cover in London.
There's a lot of national stuff that we did cover. If you look at our applications in the other cities, they cover local stories in a way that doesn't feel like local journalism and I think you'll get the same from us in London, at least I hope you will, and I hope some of you will write for us and you'll be part of that.
I hope some of you will find me on Twitter, I'm @Joshi and if you have stories to pitch in London, I'd love that.
I think there are tons of stories that journalists in London must know about and have never had a place to pitch them – and the Mill will be the place. I'm doing about a dozen commissions between now and August for the London publication, and a dozen for Glasgow. I'd love your pitches, and if there's anyone looking for full-time work, we're hiring three in London, two in Glasgow, one in Birmingham and one in Liverpool.
I think it will take a few months of finding the right people and commissioning freelance stories, and then starting to publish, hopefully, in something like October. Don't entirely hold me to that...