Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

The post Top publishers saw less traffic on day of 2024 US election versus 2020 appeared first on Press Gazette.

Update, 28 October 2024: Mill Media has completed its latest round of expansion, following its Glasgow title The Bell with the launch of “The Londoner” in the capital.

It is the sixth brand from the local newsletter publisher and the second to be launched away from Substack, where the network of titles originated.

The Londoner is starting out with three full-time reporters — feature writer and critic Hannah Williams, former FT staffer Miles Ellingham and former Press Gazette reporter Andrew Kersley. A dedicated editor for the brand has not yet been hired.

As at The Bell, stories on The Londoner will initially be free to read before moving behind a paywall in the next few months. The title’s first story was an exclusive by Kersley reporting that a Labour MP is “the landlord of a failing children’s home”, which The Londoner says the MP has threatened to sue over and was briefly acknowledged by Keir Starmer during a press conference.

The launch adds another small, paid-for journalism brand to London’s media scene. This summer saw the opening of London Centric, a Substack-based publication from former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson, the launch of a paywall at fellow London news Substack London Spy and the fifth birthday of London-focused print magazine The Fence.

Mill Media founder and interim Londoner editor Joshi Herrmann told Press Gazette “there will be some great competition for us in London”, citing other brands including the local government-focused On London, digest newsletter London Minute and “some really good borough-level newspapers like the Camden New Journal and the Social Spider papers”.

He also anticipated competition from The London Standard, the weekly successor to the daily Evening Standard newspaper. The Standard’s closure as a daily, which resulted in the loss of some 70 editorial jobs, was cited by the founders as a prompt for the creation of both The Londoner and Waterson’s London Centric.

Herrmann said London “should have dozens of outlets doing different kinds of journalism”, adding: “I think our mission and tastes are a bit different to what there is already out there, and I hope we’ll find an audience that loves The Londoner.”

Upcoming stories include features “about the difficulty of writing a ‘London novel’, about the queer nightlife scene, about the experience of dating in London and about certain conspiracy theories that have embedded themselves in the capital’s psyche”, Herrmann said, as well as stories from outside contributors Imogen West-Knights, David Aaronovitch, Zing Tseng, David James Smith and Kemi Alemoru.

The expansion has been funded out of £350,000 of investment raised from figures including CNN boss Mark Thompson and Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston.

Original story, 25 September 2024: The new Glasgow-focused title from local newsletter start-up Mill Media will be named The Bell, Press Gazette can reveal.

The new title will begin to publish on Monday (30 September), initially without a paywall, and aims to release new content three times a week.

As previously reported by Press Gazette The Bell is staffed by two full-time employees: former Novara Media contributing editor Moya Lothian-McLean and former freelance Robbie Armstrong.

They will be supported by Glaswegian writer Ophira Gottlieb, who already writes for Mill Media, and former Slate managing editor June Thomas who edit some stories and share her expertise with the team.

Stories have already been commissioned from Scottish journalists including freelances Dani Garavelli and Catriona Stewart, and Holyrood magazine writer Margaret Taylor.

The Bell will be Mill Media’s first new launch away from Substack, the newsletter platform on which the venture originally started in Manchester in 2020.

The Bell, as well as an as-yet unnamed sister title in London, are both launching on rival platform Ghost, where they are set to be joined by Mill Media’s four other titles, which also cover Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham, before the end of the year.

Mill Media to Glaswegians: ‘Give us a Bell’

Mill Media uses a paid subscription model and promises readers longer, deeper reads on their communities.

“Glasgow seems to be staring at its past, wondering where it is in the present and trying to reimagine a new future,” Armstrong said.

Lothian-McLean said The Bell wants “to tell the story of everyday people in Glasgow and reflect back at them a city that they recognise but might not see always portrayed in the media that they consume”.

The pair said upcoming stories will cover the city’s “fascination with bingo halls”, the last urban ferry on the River Clyde and “our uneasy relationship with Brutalism and high-rise flats”, adding that longer investigations will look at issues arising from events like the 2014 art school fire.

The publication’s name is inspired by the bell that appears in the city’s coat of arms and in the legend of Saint Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. Armstrong said it also alludes to an esteemed Irish literary journal of the same name. The brand’s logo aims to evoke the style of Glaswegian Art Nouveau architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Lothian-McLean said the pair plan to distribute tip cards around the city inviting Glaswegians to “give us a Bell”.

“We want to be out there talking to as many people as possible all the time,” she said.

“In a lot of modern journalism jobs you’ve got these amazing reporters who want to give their time to stories and they want the resources to do it… The luxury of time, and the luxury of resources, are much more scant than they were in the past, and that’s due to the shrinking landscape of journalism. We’re not only in a position, hopefully now, to do that ourselves, we’re also in a position where we can work with those journalists in Glasgow.”

Glasgow is not a news desert, already boasting titles including the Glasgow Times and Scottish national paper The Herald.

Armstrong said: “We don’t want to detract from what’s already going on in Glasgow. But we feel the approach that The Mill takes is a little bit different.”

[Read more: Scottish local news coverage mapped – All districts have at least one outlet]

Lothian-McLean added: “Any thriving city should have a thriving media landscape. The Bell isn’t there to try and compete in the same way – it wants to be part of Glasgow’s media landscape, and we’re just one seed in, repopulating, replanting what it used to have.”

Whereas Armstrong has spent almost half his life in Glasgow, Lothian-McLean moved to the city for her role at The Bell. She said she was “working with someone who knows it like the back of their hand, so I’m there as fresh eyes.

“I think that’s a good combination – you’ve got someone who’s so versed in a city and then you’ve got someone who can notice new things about a city that might seem so standard to people who live there.”

The post Mill Media follows launch of Glasgow title The Bell with ‘The Londoner’ appeared first on Press Gazette.

More is not always best when it comes to attracting paid subscribers to journalism.

This is the view of Farrah Storr, head of publisher partnerships at Substack UK, speaking at the Press Gazette Future of Media Trends event in London last week. She also said it is a mistake to see Substack as just a newsletter platform.

The former editor-in-chief of Elle UK said: “The best way to think about Substack is to see it as a media empire in the palm of your hand.

“We’re seven years old now and in that time we have reimagined what a newsletter can be. You can send a podcast, a voice note, a video — and yes, of course a classic written newsletter.

“I joined the company three years ago and it’s true that the majority of writers were very much looking for a classic written ‘column’-style newsletter. That’s still a hugely popular format by the way and there are lots of our biggest columnists who do it brilliantly: Ian Dunt, David Aaronovitch and more recently Jameela Jamil.”

She said one of the key benefits of the platform is it allows journalists to own their audience, and take it with them somewhere else if they wish by exporting their list of email subscribers. Other platforms, such as Twitter/X, are harder to monetise and keep ownership of the reader data.

She said: “Essentially Substack has allowed writers, creators and publishers to house everything in one place whilst also allowing them to own their audience. So many brands have spent years creating free content on social media platforms only to realise they don’t own the very audience they have spend years creating.

“On Substack you get to build a solid email list and make money from those who love the work you do. If I was still editing magazines today it would be a no-brainer to create something on Substack.”

Substack head of UK partnerships Farrah Storr: Publishers should let their reporters earn extra money from Substack

Asked whether readers have newsletter fatigue given the growing number which are available, she said: “I would say paid subscribers don’t always want more content, that’s one of the biggest learnings I’ve seen over time. What they want is intimacy.

“They want access to something you have never shared before, maybe a think piece about motherhood, maybe the books on your bedside table (a very popular thing to share).

“Maybe they want access to your community or a voice note you’ve sent them as you’re walking in the park. That might not sound so polished to some, but polish is not the point. Being real is the essence of Substack.”

Many high-profile journalists have left paid employment to set up their own paid-for newsletters (and some are now making more money by doing so). How does Storr think publishers can hang on to their brightest stars?

“As someone who was a magazine writer for years, I think a lot of journalists really want to stay working at their publishing houses. Being a writer on a magazine or paper is a wonderful job, but it’s precarious. I don’t know a single journalist working today who does not worry about the future of the industry.

“So why not let them have a Substack? They can earn some extra money, publish pieces they wouldn’t ordinarily publish on the day job and here’s the win-win: if they have a Substack, and you have as a publisher have a Substack, you’re both going to win, because there can be cross-pollination.

“I could imagine a model where somebody works four days a week and then the other day they’re allowed to work on their Substack and maybe publishers think about having a mutually beneficial share of that revenue.”
 
Storr publishes her own Substack called Things Worth Knowing which is a mixture of fashion, lifestyle and real-life stories. She describes it as “basically the sort of stuff I was creating when I edited Elle and Cosmo“.

Asked how she balances that with her day job, she said: “I do it all as a hobby. I do one thing a week, because that’s all I have time for. I write on a Saturday and publish Sunday morning. And astonishingly I make almost as much money as I did as an editor and it’s my side hustle. So that’s why it’s really powerful and I think people underestimate what people are willing to pay for.

“There are tens of millions of readers on Substack and millions of them have got their bank details in the system. So you are only ever one click away from somebody spotting your work in the Substack ecosystem (either through another writer recommending you or through our own social media vertical called Notes), and then becoming a paid subscriber.”

Asked how to turn a print magazine into a product on Substack, she said: “One of the things which translates very well is the old magazine format of ‘Ask Me Anything’. So you could say: ‘Hey, on Monday night between 7 and 8pm, the team will be on hand to answer your questions and if you are paid subscriber, you can ask a question and it will be answered.’

“Things like that are working incredibly well, but are a really low lift for the team.”

Are Gen Z opening newsletters?

“I tend to advise people not to get hung up on open rates,” Storr said. “If someone has chosen to be part of your Substack world then whether they are 18 or 80, they are going to open that email.”

Substack shares tips and insights for publishers here.

The post Farrah Storr: Why less can be more when selling online content appeared first on Press Gazette.

Manchester Mill and its sister titles are moving off newsletter platform Substack for the first time and onto websites hosted by competitor Ghost.

The Manchester Mill launched on Substack in 2020 and the Birmingham Dispatch, Sheffield Tribune and Liverpool Post followed suit.

Mill Media founder Joshi Herrmann told Press Gazette that its forthcoming publications covering Glasgow and London will launch on dedicated websites built through Ghost, and that the other four will ultimately shift to go the same way.

Herrmann stressed to Press Gazette that the departure was not acrimonious, saying “it’s been a difficult decision”.

“Substack have been a really good partner for us,” he said on Wednesday. “They’ve been a big part of our growth… We’re really grateful for the support we got from them during the Substack local initiative. I don’t want to make it sound like there’s some big issue with Substack, because there isn’t.”

Instead, he said, the move was prompted by cost considerations, the relationship Mill Media wanted with its audience and its desire for greater customisation as it matures.

Mill Media says it is approaching £1m annual revenue

Substack takes 10% of the subscription revenue earned by newsletters on the platform, and Herrmann said “that would represent more than £100,000 pounds for us next year”, suggesting the company anticipates annual turnover of £1m in 2025.

The company had told Press Gazette it was on course to book £400,000 in annual revenue in August last year. In November 2022, when it first hit profitability, it appeared to be making £264,000.

Ghost does not take a revenue share but charges a flat fee for usage based on audience size: a team with five staff users and up to 1,000 audience members pays $50 per year while a company that wants to reach 10,000 members with an unlimited number of employees pays $199 and prices continue upwards from there.

John O’Nolan, the chief executive of of Ghost, said: “Mill Media has proven that local news can be independent, high quality, and crucially sustainable. We’re thrilled they’re moving to Ghost, and we look forward to working with them as they continue building their business and inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.”

“I want to spend as much of our money as possible on journalists,” Herrmann said. “We are going to save a lot of money by publishing on Ghost and using custom websites rather than Substack, and that’s important for us because we’re not a media giant, we need to spend our income carefully.”

Herrmann said that the 10% cut taken by Substack “makes sense for a lot of people… if you derive most of your growth from Substack it makes sense”.

A newsletter about national politics or technology, he said, stood to benefit from Substack’s large user base.

“The difference for us, and for other local publishers, is we’re only looking for growth in one particular place, and so the value of Substack’s… network effects are reduced.”

Herrmann said the Mill also wanted “to have a direct relationship with our users rather than being mediated by a platform”, particularly because Substack is currently promoting its app and introducing features more commonly associated with social media, for example followers.

“People who are followers… they’re not people who we can take with us when we leave,” he said.

He said “I 100% understand” why Substack wants its users to embrace the app, “but it doesn’t align with our ambition to be an independent media company where we have a direct relationship with our users”.

The last reason for the departure, Herrmann said, was that “we increasingly want to plug in more custom tools”, for example to allow the company to A/B test its landing pages and welcome emails. “That will all be easier when we have a more custom stack [of publisher technologies].”

He added it would “allow us to make our sites look more distinctive and more professional”.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie said: “We’ve always been optimistic about the potential of the Substack model for local news. The success of Joshi and his team at Mill Media have demonstrated the model’s viability.

“We’re incredibly proud of what they’ve achieved on Substack, and we’ll root for them as they take this next step.”

In 2021 the Mill Media titles won funding of up to $100,000 from Substack as part of a scheme to support local journalism on the platform.

The company has hired Novara Media’s Moya Lothian-McLean and freelance Robbie Armstrong to launch its as-yet unnamed Glasgow title this autumn.

Herrmann said this week they are close to finishing hiring for the also-unnamed London title, with 12 long reads already commissioned and six of them filed. Some 270 people applied for a staff writer role with the new publication, he added.

The two new titles are being launched as part of an expansion slated to double Mill Media’s total headcount from 11 to 22 over six months. The growth is being funded using £350,000 raised last year from investors including CNN chief executive Mark Thompson and Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston.

The post Mill Media says goodbye to Substack and moves onto competitor Ghost appeared first on Press Gazette.

Substack-based publisher Mill Media has hired Novara Media contributing editor Moya Lothian-McLean and freelance Robbie Armstrong to staff its upcoming title covering Glasgow.

The pair begin at Mill Media in September. A name for the Glasgow publication — one of two new titles the company announced in June — has not yet been chosen.

Mill Media founder Joshi Herrmann told Press Gazette the new outlet has nonetheless already commissioned a series of long-form stories and investigations, including an essay from Scottish freelance Dani Garavelli who was shortlisted last year for a British Journalism Award for features journalism.

“I’m incredibly excited about our new title in Glasgow,” Herrmann said. “One of the first things that happened after we announced our fundraise last year was that I got messages and calls from journalists in Glasgow saying that we should launch there next.

“It’s a proper media city that has a very long history of leading newspapers and fantastic writers, and we hope to carry on that tradition.”

‘It’s the kind of work every journalist wants to be doing’

Lothian-McLean, who is moving from London to Glasgow for the Mill job, told Press Gazette: “I’ve been raving about Mill Media ever since I first stumbled across them – I’m a paid up subscriber to multiple Mill publications!

“It’s become apparent they’re doing something very exciting in the media landscape, which is part of a push to revive long-form, rich journalism at a local level. Reading Mill Media pieces made me feel excited and envious. It’s the kind of work every journalist wants to be doing. When the call came, I had to answer it!

“As for Glasgow, it’s such an exciting city, stuffed with the sort of journalistic talent and stories that make it a perfect spot for a new Mill Media launch to land in. I’m so excited to be working with the Scottish team.”

Writing on X she added: “Thank you so much to everyone at Novara Media for such an instructive two years and the opportunities I’ve been given as part of the UK’s biggest independent media org. And most of all to the supporters! I hope to keep telling your stories alongside the amazing Mill Media team.”

Lothian-McLean will continue to co-host Novara podcast If I Speak alongside the supporter-funded title’s senior editor Ash Sarkar.

Armstrong, who is already based in Glasgow, is an audio producer and food writer as well as a reporter, having written previously for The Guardian, Sunday Times and food titles Noble Rot and Vittles.

He said: “Mill Media’s approach to local news is not only exciting, but also a blueprint for a type of essential reporting left to wither on the branch for far too long. Glasgow is crying out for their brand of quality, community-driven journalism. We can’t wait to get started.”

Tuesday’s hiring announcements are part of a broader 11-role hiring spree at Mill Media that will see its headcount double.

As well as the Glasgow launch the business is hiring for a new London title to be staffed by three people.

The expansion has been funded out of a 2023 fundraising round that won £350,000 from investors including CNN chief executive Mark Thompson and Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston.

The post Mill Media hires Novara’s Moya Lothian-McLean for new Glasgow title appeared first on Press Gazette.

Two veteran local newspaper journalists who left their title amid cost cuts in May are already making more money after launching their own newsletters on Substack.

Bob Dunning and Wendy Weitzel had been at The Davis Enterprise in California since 1970 and 1998 respectively. Both started newsletters on Substack in May and each now boasts more than 1,000 paying subscribers.

Dunning, who had contributed five columns a week to the now twice-weekly paper for 54 years, was laid off in May without explanation or severance. The move prompted Weitzel, who wrote a column about local businesses for the paper named Comings and Goings, to quit in solidarity.

The pair started their Substack newsletters almost immediately: Dunning’s is titled “The Wary One” and Weitzel’s has kept its previous name.

Dunning said he had been paid $26 an hour for his 40 hours of work a week at the Enterprise, amounting to a little over $54,000 a year. A month and a half on, his annualised salary now stands at approximately $92,000 before the 10% cut taken by Substack.

Around $14,000 of that figure comes from the 40 or so people who paid $350 to be “founding members”. On top of those, Dunning said around 80% of his subscribers paid a $70 annual fee upfront rather than the monthly $7 option, meaning “​​what has actually come directly into my bank account is around $70,000 at this point”.

“It’s stunning,” he said. “I’m afraid to touch it because I don’t think it’s real. It’s like, that’s not real money, that’s crypto!”

Weitzel said she felt “more rewarded for what I’m doing” by the new set-up. Unlike Dunning, who got his first job in news by walking into the Enterprise office and asking for one, Weitzel holds a journalism degree and spent a decade as the paper’s managing editor.

By the time she left in May she was a freelance contributor paid “a couple of hundred dollars for each column” and making the rest of her income from public relations work.

But now, she says, “I have more motivation to spend a little extra time” on the column, which has kept its local business focus.

Columnists leave local paper for Substack, say employer made ‘a fatal mistake’

Dunning told Press Gazette he has “around 4,200 subscribers”, of whom around 1,100 pay. Weitzel said her figures look approximately the same, giving her Substack revenue of around $50,000 per year.

The pair said they are often told they were the reasons their readers subscribed to The Davis Enterprise, and Dunning speculated that each of the pair’s total subscriber lists were now larger than the Enterprise’s circulation, adding that “my paper carrier said he hasn’t gotten a new subscription in a couple of years, and he’s down 30, 40% in terms of the papers he’s tossing”.

The Enterprise’s publisher, McNaughton Media, did not return a request for comment, but in an awards submission last year the paper entered itself into a category reserved for weekly newspapers with circulations of between 4,301 and 11,000.

The pair said their subscriber success may be due to the fact they already had strong followings.

“I have almost 6,000 followers on Facebook for my Comings and Goings column,” Weitzel said. “Bob had just a loyal following who read the hard copy of the paper. They were going to follow us wherever we were, and after [Dunning was let go], it really created a momentum of people who were just mad at the paper. 

“It was cheaper to buy our subscriptions than it was to buy the paper, and so it was kind of a no-brainer for a lot of them.”

Despite the pair’s suspicion that they have cut into the Enterprise’s subscriber figures, Dunning said he didn’t feel he was competing with his former colleagues, saying “there’s some people that still do both subscribe to me and Wendy and still take the paper”.

But he was blunt about the commercial impact he thought letting him go would have.

“I think, honestly, it was a fatal, fatal mistake… It stuns me that they made the decision. It was a bad decision, not just for me personally, but a bad decision for the paper.”

The post Veteran columnists making more money on Substack after local newspaper exits appeared first on Press Gazette.

Mill Media, the Substack-based publisher behind the Manchester Mill, Liverpool Post, Birmingham Dispatch and Sheffield Tribune, has announced a major hiring round, looking to add 11 roles in the next six months.

The jobs – which span editorial, production and commercial responsibilities – will pay between £25,000 and £50,000 and have been advertised to coincide with the forthcoming launch of Mill titles in London and Glasgow. The expansion will double Mill Media’s headcount when complete.

Mill Media editor-in-chief Joshi Herrmann said the expansion had been prompted by news last week that the Evening Standard is set to go down from a daily print publication schedule to weekly. The Glasgow launch has been planned for longer. Herrmann said the city was “the traditional home of Scottish journalism, so I know we will find lots of great writers and editors who want to contribute”.

The Mill’s growth will be fuelled by previously-untapped funding of £350,000 raised last year from a group of private investors including Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston and CNN chief executive and former BBC and New York Times boss Mark Thompson. Mill Media claims to have been profitable since that fundraising round in September and now counts 7,750 paying members across its newsletter titles alongside 110,000 free subscribers.

The publisher says it is hiring the new roles over three rounds, adding four staff members in June/July, four more in August/September and three in October/November. There are six staff writer roles open, two assistant editor jobs, and positions available for a copy editor, advertising sales manager and social/video producer.

Five of the jobs are based at Mill headquarters in Manchester, three in London and one each in Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham.

The job listings give a look into the work culture at Mill Media. In line with the business' professed goal of "giving journalists the time they need to write great stories", the job ads say staff writers "are expected to file roughly one story per week, anything from 1,000 to 3,000 words". Manchester-based staff are expected to come into the Mill office four times a week.

Earlier this week The London Spy revealed that it had attracted 225 paid subscribers in the first month of its Substack-based newsletter going behind a paywall.

Last month another The London Minute launched a free daily newsletter for London providing a daily digest of links every morning at 7am.

[Read more: Fleet Street bosses battle to revive newsroom spirit in the age of flexible working]

The post Mill Media set to double staff total to 22 as it reveals London expansion appeared first on Press Gazette.

More than 225 people signed up as paying subscribers to a new investigative newsletter-based outlet for London in the first month of its paywall.

The London Spy is a Substack-based newsletter publishing digests, features and investigations about the capital – inspired by the model behind the Manchester Mill. The Mill itself added 272 paying subscribers in a week in May after it went public about a threat of legal action against it.

The London Spy‘s recent reports for paid subscribers have included an investigation into last year’s smoke-fuelled panic on the Tube at Clapham Common, a look at the decline of independent pubs and a 2,500-word report on how Brixton Academy had managed to reopen 16 months after two people died in a crowd crush.

The newsletter launched in summer last year and has more than 5,000 free subscribers Paid subscriptions were turned on at the start of May and more than 225 people have signed up to pay about £5 per month each, meaning more than £1,125 in monthly income so far.

The London Spy publishes two emails per week: one with a news round-up and free feature at the weekends, and one on Thursdays with a paid-for long-form piece.

Editor Alex Clark told Press Gazette the aim with further investment would be to add one more email per week on Tuesdays featuring a free news briefing and a paid piece below – although any balance of free and paid will depend on the response of readers.

Clark, currently a part-time journalist at The Guardian‘s visual storytelling department who has spent time at Tortoise, The Telegraph and Newsquest, works on The London Spy with one friend who also works in journalism. They both hope to eventually go full-time.

Clark said: “We’re really excited about how our first month has gone — it’s been a clear sign from our readers that they’re ready for a different kind of journalism in London.

“For too long Londoners have had to watch on as their own city media crumbles, and quality suffers.

“That’s about to change. Our jump in funding unlocks so many big things for the Spy, and we have our readers to thank for that.

“We’re optimistic that we can build on this momentum, and create a sustainable news model supporting quality journalism for Londoners.”

As The London Spy prepared to mark one month of paid subscriptions last week, the Evening Standard told staff it planned to drop its daily print edition and launch a weekly paper instead alongside its online presence.

Clark said: “Our thoughts are with any Standard journalists during the uncertain weeks ahead.

“There are so many journalists there producing great London reporting — from scoops about City Hall to smaller stories in individual boroughs. They’re just being let down by their bosses.

“But we want to say that the Spy’s door is open to anyone at the Standard who’s fed up.”

The outlet has published a pitching guide for freelance journalists as it put out a call for “news exclusives and anything investigative, as well as in-depth features that explore a current issue” of between 1,000 and 2,000 words – with a rate of 30p per word.

Clark said of this rate: “We’re refusing to cut corners when it comes to paying our external writers. The rationale is simple: how can we credibly report about London, and its huge problems with affordability, if we’re not willing to play our own part?”

Potential contributors are told the Spy wants “pieces that could have just as easily appeared in the Guardian, Times or Economist. Vice News and Private Eye aren’t too far off either.”

The London Minute launch

Also in May ex-Guardian journalist Michael MacLeod launched a London version of his daily digest of Edinburgh local news.

With The London Minute, which is also on Substack, he curates a list of links to local news stories in and around the city and sends them at 7am every day.

MacLeod told Press Gazette he launched the London version on 14 May and by last Thursday had reached 230 subscribers, of whom 20 were paying, which he said was ahead of where he was at the same point in Edinburgh. (Update: on Monday morning it surpassed 300 in total.)

Both newsletters “will always be free with the option to pay”, MacLeod has said, but the paying subscribers helped MacLeod go full-time on the newsletters this year, earning a salary after the 10% hosting fees, payment provider fees and savings for tax.

He also does consultancy work for other publishers on newsletters and helped Newsquest launch The Glasgow Wrap, which has more than 1,000 subscribers, this year.

The Edinburgh Minute has 10,400 free subscribers and 1,445 paying subscribers and has so far sent 500,000 visits to local news websites – which MacLeod said is “not huge for some of them, but for others I’ve been told it’s significant.

“It’s also helped people sell out tickets for events, make friends, raise money for various causes and increase a sense of community. That for me is the biggest win. I care as much about traffic as I do about helping people realise that all this great stuff was already happening where we live, and I’ve just put it in one place each morning.”

Explaining why he decided to launch in London, MacLeod said: “The London news ecosystem is patchy. Some areas are vibrant while others are under-served. I have so far gathered 80 sources which I check every morning for updates on, then link to their work in the 7am newsletter. It’s a lot of tabs open, with the aim of saving everyone else from that pain.

“Before going live, I spent the first part of this year asking local publishers if they’d find something like The Edinburgh Minute useful in London and literally everyone mentioned how referrals from Google and social media had plummeted. So the Minute has been welcomed and I’ve enjoyed meeting publishers on calls and in real life to understand where we can collaborate.”

MacLeod added: “It’s great to see new enthusiasm around local independent news despite the bleaker news about larger corporate ‘local’ titles. I think a reason the Minute format works is that the local media landscape is more fractured than ever while people’s need to know is stronger than ever.”

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Henry Winter is launching a paid-for newsletter on Substack as the new home of his journalism after being made redundant from The Times.

Winter told Press Gazette he was “itching to write about football again, because it doesn’t leave your blood” and as a result he soft launched last week and officially goes live today (Monday).

He plans to put out a newsletter at around 9-10am each weekday morning (having got up at 5.30am). The Monday newsletter will be free and the rest of the week will be for paying subscribers only.

Winter is promising “news, views and interviews” both in written, audio and video form, saying he knows it is “important to evolve” even after a near 40-year career in journalism.

He described his goal for himself to be a “very unathletic decathlete” in terms of mixing mediums. He is also writing a book, makes frequent radio appearances and has more than one million followers on Twitter/X.

Winter, who previously spent 21 years at The Daily Telegraph, announced earlier this month that he had been made redundant from The Times, where he has been chief football writer since 2015. He is the incumbent Football Journalist of the Year at the British Sports Journalism Awards.

He told Press Gazette he had “no regrets” and it had been his dream to work at The Times since he was about 15.

“I respect them so much and I can say what a wonderful time I had there, eight great years. They gave me a platform to go to Ukraine, to go to tournaments, to leave with a couple of trophies, and it was a dream to work there.

“So I was lucky to fulfil my dream, obviously disappointed to go but touched by the reaction on social media.”

Speaking on Friday, just over a week after announcing his departure, Winter said he has had a “lovely” reaction from all 20 Premier League clubs, many clubs in the English Football League, football associations and others.

He therefore still hopes to be able to attend some games and put out match reports on his Substack, although a lot of what he will be doing will be “about the issues of the game and interviews”.

“I’m certainly going to the Euros,” he added. “I’m not staying in a nice hotel where all the boys are staying, I’ll be in an Airbnb around the corner, but the important thing is to go to the games.”

Winter, who back in 2010 was voted Britain’s top sports journalist in a Press Gazette poll, also said some players have been in touch and said they would be happy to do something with him on Substack.

“That’s where I’ve got to become cuter and do some of it as video and do some of it as audio, and just mix all those up together – coming back to the decathlete element.”

Why Henry Winter is setting up shop at Substack

Winter’s launch comes almost exactly a year after fellow former Times writer, columnist David Aaronovitch, went live with his own Substack, which now has more than 13,000 subscribers.

Winter revealed he was first approached by the Substack team about three years ago but he “loved The Times so I wasn’t going to leave”.

However he has followed how other sports journalists have used the platform: “America’s obviously ahead of us on a lot of things and you look at how Substack’s used in America by sports writers, you look at the baseball writers, basketball writers and some of them have left, obviously their decision, some major American publications and set up on their own,” he said. “They’ve got huge followings.

“So there’s a market out there and better writers than me, say like Jamie Jackson at the Observer/Guardian, he’s their Manchester man – he’s on Substack and he’s really good on it but he’s a bit more so technologically sophisticated and design orientated than me.”

Winter said he had also been inspired by Grant Wahl, the American soccer journalist who left Sports Illustrated in 2020 to launch his own podcast and newsletter on Substack. Wahl died suddenly aged 48 in December 2022 while covering a World Cup match in Qatar.

“He’s been a role model for me in many ways as a man, as a football journalist, but also in the way he approached new media like that,” Winter said.

Industry ‘fracturing’ but everyone needs same skill: Storytelling

Winter, who began covering football in the 1985/86 season and remembers knocking on people’s doors asking to use their phone so he could dictate his copy down the phone, said the biggest change in his career has been the arrival of Wi-Fi and the iPhone, which has meant citizen journalists are “almost the first draft of history now as much as us”.

Last week Guardian sports writer Jonathan Liew wrote that Winter’s surprise exit from The Times was a sign of how football “has been fracturing for years: attention and influence draining away not just from traditional newspapers, but from everybody… What once constituted our shared football space has splintered into a million galaxies: forums and fan media, podcasts and Youtube channels, blogs and specialist websites, Reddit and Tiktok, the curated feeds that allow us to view a game through whatever filter we choose: tribal, social, banter, fantasy team.”

Winter told Press Gazette in response that there was “definitely a lot of truth in the fracturing” but he viewed everyone as having “the same skill, it’s storytelling, and whether you’re doing it in 100,000 words, and you’ve taken two years to tell that story in hardback version, or whether you’re doing it down the line adlibbing something from a football match or whether you’re doing it on a podcast, or whether you’re doing as a tweet and there’s that immediacy, I still think it’s the same skill of storytelling.”

Asked whether it showed a decreasing influence of and appetite for content from legacy titles, Winter disagreed and cited several “brilliant” journalists from the likes of The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian.

He said: “If they put a story out on social media, everyone knows it’s 100% correct. There’s absolute trust for them. So, in a way, everyone sort of says, oh, there’s a media wild west on social media, but actually, it’s highlighted the people who are genuinely in the know…”

He compared it to the boost in subscriptions at titles like The Times during the Covid-19 pandemic: “I still think people aren’t stupid and they know who they can trust.”

The post Henry Winter launches Substack: ‘I’m going to Euros… but I’ll be in an Airbnb’ appeared first on Press Gazette.

Open publishing and newsletter technology has “opened the market” for journalists to launch new publications according to the co-founder of a new title targeting personal finance.

Substack will be used as the content management and newsletter publishing system for MoneyIn2 which will offer personal finance advice to new investors and young people.

Co-founded by Julian Childs, former international revenue chief of Business Insider, the outlet will offer newsletters with two minutes worth of information per day.

Other co-founders include editor Jim Edwards (formerly editor in chief of Business Insider) and Kathryn Tuggle who will head up marketing. Jim Edwards is a paid contributor to Press Gazette.

Childs told Press Gazette: “I really love the newsletter model, it’s had a bit of a resurgence, and that’s been accelerated by platforms like Substack.

“That model of open CMS for newsletters has really opened the market for journalists to publish, in the same way that the internet and social media did 20 years ago.”

He added: “With newsletters, you’re more in control of building a relationship with your audience and you’re not reliant on models like Google who at any point can decide to switch things.”

Childs said that MoneyIn2 will respond to two information gaps in the current personal finance news service. The first is information catered to young people and those who do not already have money. The second is an emphasis on growing money, not just saving it.

Subscribers can receive the newsletter for free and paid subscribers receive access to extra posts and the full archive. The cost is £7/month or £65/year. The title will also carry advertising.

Substack offers journalists a free CMS but takes 10% of the revenue via subscriptions. Publishers on Substack keep all their direct-sold advertising revenue. Substack does not run its own advertising.

US-based entertainment industry title The Ankler is run entirely on Substack and is predicting revenue of $10m this year.

Childs explained where the initial funds to launch came from: “We’ve got some money from friends and family, we’ve individually put money in, we have a small amount of investment, and we expect to raise more later this year to accelerate our growth.

“But at the moment, we’re bootstrapping because we feel that it’s important for us to get out there.”

He added: “It’s interesting because so much of our audience target is now starting to take financial advice from social media which is great but also super risky.”

Of those who follow financial guidance from social media, 74% lose money or experienced an undesired outcome, according to research by Capital One.

Childs said: “We’re a credible source aiming to help people with smart advice, not ‘get rich quick’ schemes.”

“There’s also less competition for this type of media in the UK, unlike the US where there are some great newsletters which do similar projects to us.”

The outlet will start with three newsletters a week but hopes to increase to daily frequency and being expanding the editorial team.

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