Abstract
Who’d give up a senior job on a famous newspaper to launch a one-man news site? The man who did explains why
When I told fellow journalists I’d quit as Guardian media editor to write an online-only local news outlet about London, most concluded I was having a breakdown: "Who on earth would give up a staff job with the industry in this state?" Some were politely supportive: "Good for you, doing your own thing." One was blunt: "You’re an idiot."
It wasn’t what I’d had in mind a few months earlier. As a teenager, I would refresh the MediaGuardian website obsessively and I was 28 when I secured my dream job as The Guardian’s media editor. I’d covered everything from phone hacking to Lynton Crosby’s disinformation campaigns, the Wagatha Christie trial to Gulf influence over British journalism.
But there’s only so many times you can write about another round of redundancies at a newspaper publisher whose financial future depends on the rate at which its remaining print readers are dying off. Young people I met were barely familiar with the concept of a print newspaper, yet many journalists still fixated over front pages rather than homepages. I couldn’t face another BBC scandal ending with the announcement of an "independent review". And I’d watched journalists in Reach’s local newsroom churning out eight pieces a day chasing clicks for shrinking advertising revenues.
I lost count of editors who talked about The New York Times’s evolution into a "lifestyle brand", when everyone knew that meant readers paying for a daily word game. I’d broken stories about BBC local radio cuts and watched the outcry from people who privately admitted they hadn’t listened to the same stations in years. People wanted journalism to thrive, for the UK to have a healthy fourth estate, but not enough were trying something different. It felt like time to put my money where my mouth was.
I’d just returned to work after six months of shared parental leave with my baby daughter, cycling her around London, spotting unreported stories everywhere. This was the city in which my children were growing up, with nine million other people, but who was doing proper reporting about power in the capital and the decisions that would affect their lives?
Then, two things happened. First, sources in the Evening Standard newsroom gave me the story that the only remaining pan-London daily newspaper was to shut down and sack half of its remaining staff. The emotional response online to my exclusive was overwhelming. It’s dangerous to read too much into nostalgia from journalists but the sense that London journalism was missing something was sincere.
Secondly, like so many news outlets forced to tighten their belts, The Guardian opened a voluntary redundancy scheme. It didn’t have many takers. Its staff feel like a family and working there is one of the best jobs in journalism. As much as they might moan, there’s a deep sense of identity. Suddenly, there was an offer on the table that would allow me to try something different, with a financial cushion to pay the mortgage and the nursery fees. It felt like a once-in-a-career chance to see if I could earn an income from journalism in a different manner.
There wasn’t much of a plan, just a commitment to writing some in-depth journalism I wanted to read. My partner, an experienced journalist and former editor herself, took a bit of convincing. But she could see the potential — and, in the tradition of Fleet Street, a conversation over a glass of wine in a Soho restaurant gave us a name: London Centric. People complained that British media was fixated on the capital; what if that became the selling point? I set a target: six months to show that there was a route to a financially sustainable future for London journalism.
I filed my last story for The Guardian at the end of August, doing a favour for a news editor who thought it would be hilarious to make me write about an alpaca that had been euthanised on the orders of the government. For all the scoops I’m proud of breaking, my last byline will forever be under "Keir Starmer should review killing of Geronimo the alpaca, says farmer".
The following Monday, I was on my own. No income, no newspaper name to make people take my calls, not even a dead alpaca to write about. I started with the obvious power base in the capital. I’d been in touch with the office of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and got a brief meeting with the mayor to set out my plan. I tried to explain the idea of reader-supported journalism about London, where the public would pay to receive a handful of original in-depth reported pieces of journalism every week about the capital, delivered as a part-paywalled subscription newsletter.
My pitch was that it would be positioned upstream of the major broadcasters who still reach millions of Londoners on a daily basis. It would be the outlet to follow if you wanted to read exclusives before they hit the mainstream, or the outlet to brief if you wanted to start a conversation about the capital.
My looming deadline was the closure of the Evening Standard as a daily paper. After a renaissance as a freesheet under the ownership of the Lebedev family in the late 2000s, it had suffered at the hands of changing reading habits, racking up £l00million in losses. There were three main issues. First, Londoners didn’t want a print product. Secondly, its website was a click-chasing outlet aimed at a global audience that tried to game Google by churning out stories about Manchester United and Taylor Swift, rather than giving space to London transport policy. Finally, it took political positions out of step with many of its readers. Its backing for Boris Johnson, who would hand Evgeny Lebedev a seat in the House of Lords, gave it the feel of a newspaper written for Evgeny Lebedev and his friends.
Lord Lebedev lends an unwitting hand
Earlier this year, the mysterious Saudi Arabian investors who had continued to subsidise the outlet had enough and pulled the plug. As one Standard journalist put it to me while considering his redundancy offer: "Lebedev doesn’t need us now he’s got his peerage."
Without any PR budget, I decided to let the Evening Standard do the heavy lifting: I’d announce my plans the day it stopped publishing, sneak into coverage of its closure, and hope that Londoners sad about its demise saw that someone was trying a different model for local news. I needed a format, a logo, a website and a pricing model — in three weeks. I went with Substack, which began life as a newsletter publisher but is transforming into a general provider of paywalled services. The plus side is its audiences are used to subscribing; the downside is its limited ability to customise the site and the 10% revenue cut (plus card processing fees) it takes.
I picked the brains of friends and contacts. I built a basic spreadsheet to work out the revenue I needed to pay myself and hire the occasional freelancer on national-level pay rates. Much of it was gut instinct after years of reporting on the media industry. I was writing and editing the launch piece, calling contacts to build a pipeline of stories, trying to get the word out, running the site, designing it, and updating the web domain records that pointed people to it.
What happened next was perhaps inevitable: within minutes of announcing London Centric to the world, I managed to take the entire site offline for an hour through technological incompetence. Despite this, 2,000 people signed up on that first day. Incredibly, after 24 hours and with nothing other than a promise that I’d ultimately deliver the goods, thousands of people had joined the free list and several hundred people had become paying members. Now they needed something to read.
One of my first stories involved doorstepping Lord Lebedev at the photoshoot for his relaunch of the Evening Standard as the London Standard. I asked him about Saudi funding and why he hadn’t given his staff more than a token redundancy payment. A week later, he popped up in my replies on X to object to the story: "You’re [sic] ex colleagues tell me the general feeling was you are a prick." That tweet prompted dozens of people to sign up to London Centric as paying subscribers — a selfless investment by the noble lord in the capital’s local journalism scene that enabled me to hire an extra freelancer that week.
People are pessimistic about online journalism, but I have faith that it’s meritocratic and rewards reporters who can produce interesting material. Journalism might end up being a smaller, leaner industry but people seek out the best stories, told in an intriguing manner. Readers ultimately reject reporting that is little more than an embedded tweet followed by some lines stolen from Wikipedia.
This is why many corporate local news sites owned by the likes of Reach — now asking reporters to do those physically impossible eight stories a day — are doomed without a change of direction. The public statements about the value of local papers I received as Guardian media editor from industry lobby groups rarely matched the reality of their sites. They talked about local news outlets being at the heart of their communities. The reality was often a newspaper staffed by a couple of recent graduates earning barely above the minimum wage, uploading police press releases and meeting click targets by writing "what is in the middle aisle of Aldi this week". My inbox was full of 24-year-olds leaving the industry after a few years, their dreams destroyed in the viral content mines. If you want someone to rewrite things that are already out there, then AI will soon do that job.
Churnalism — fast rewriting of stories for clicks — leaves no time to do actual reporting. The biggest challenge at London Centric has been balancing the time to file stories — at a table in a cafe somewhere, even over 5G mobile signal deep under London on the Jubilee line — with the time knocking on doors. One of my first investigations was the sudden closure of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a classic tale of allegations of financial irregularities and generational culture wars, featuring high-end lawyers and protesting drag queens. I spent days knocking on doors of members and was threatened with being reported to the police. It’s the best thing I’ve published so far but reporting takes time — and not every call or meeting leads to copy
My piece on the Transport for London cyberattack at the end of October was a prime example of a story that needed time. The attack had been covered back in September, but no one had spent days talking to TfL insiders about the fallout, or to Londoners whose lives were upturned. It took a few days to put together the story of a teenager who was skipping lunch because of the broken TfL system leaving him out of pocket, alongside TfL’s boss saying it had been handled well, and cyber security experts saying it was far from over. BBC London followed up the findings on its TV and radio broadcasts. There’s also room for old-fashioned consumer journalism: for all the stories scrutinising the capital’s politicians, the one that really resonated set out the technical reasons the mobile phone signal in London is so bad, prompting a discussion on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show. A story about London hospitals charging patients by the hour for wheelchairs went everywhere.
It s different without a big name calling card
It’s too much work for one person — I’ve been fairly honest about that. The launch party has been a full-time job in itself, squeezed in between writing copy and putting in calls. I’ve been lucky to work with a young freelancer, Cormac Kehoe, on a story about London councillors taking freebies from venues and event promoters they take licensing decisions over. Stories like that involve hours of poring over registers of interests.
London local news hasn’t been dead if you look beyond the corporate outlets. In addition to Dave Hill’s well-established OnLondon outlet, there’s a raft of hyper-locals, from the Greenwich Wire to Enfield Dispatch and Roman Road LDN, doing excellent borough-level coverage, in addition to proper old-school outlets such as Camden New Journal. The BBC and ITV still have teams doing good journalism for large audiences. Neighbourhood Instagram accounts often fill the gap of the old local paper. Now, existing subscription-based sites such as London Spy are being joined by others such as The Londoner, which has hired three staff in the capital with external investment.
One of the biggest challenges has been going back to the ground floor of journalism. The privilege of working for The Guardian is a name that makes people take your calls. As an unknown upstart, it’s been back to being asked by council press officers if I know how journalism works. Some of them don’t seem to have had a phone call from a reporter in some time. One tried to explain how rights of reply worked to me. That said, I was relieved to be out of the building when news broke that The Guardian was planning to sell The Observer to James Harding’s Tortoise. Covering that story as the in-house media reporter would not have been much fun.
The flipside of a challenge of being a tiny outlet is the close relationship you have with readers. Their comments have made this all worthwhile. Sam Freedman, the UK’s most successful political Substacker, tweeted that "for the first time in my life I feel like there’s a publication telling me something new about the city I live in". One reader subscribed because they enjoyed seeing "whose cages you are rattling". I’ve read every comment, every story suggestion, and every bit of advice. My direct WhatsApp number is at the end of every story. The subscriber model means that they are literally my bosses, and without their support I can’t keep London Centric going.
In an era of shrinking readerships, shrinking revenues and shrinking newsrooms, it’s not unusual to find journalists who argue that local reporting has a vital part to play. I jacked in my job and bet the farm on that belief. When I broke the news to my partner that I was going to pay my half of the mortgage by asking people on the internet for money in return for reporting, the response was sceptical, but supportive. I asked for a year to try to make it work. After two months, I can see a business model and I’ve told stories that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. I believe that in a year we can change our city by scrutinising the powerful, be it landlords, the mayor’s office or the people who hold the wealth that makes London tick.
I’m exhausted, optimistic, and having a disgusting amount of fun.
Footnotes
Jim Waterson’s online news site London Centric is at londoncentric.media. He already reports more than 10,000 subscribers.