Local news publisher Mill Media to come to London
Regional news outlet Mill Media will use capital raised in a successful fundraising round last year to launch a London operation by the end of 2024, the publisher has said.
The move from Mill, which currently has offices Liverpool, Birmingham and its home city of Manchester, comes just days after Evening Standard decided to pair back its daily newspaper to a weekly edition.
The outlet’s move into the capital is was announced by the outlet alongside the news that it will also set up a presence in Glasgow, both of which are being bankrolled by a successful funding round last year.
The capital round, which thanks to its profitability has not yet been used by the company, was backed by big names like former Channel 4 boss Mark Thompson and Nicholas Johnson, the publisher of Axios. Mill Media said at the time the funding would help it to double in size by the end of 2024, when it hopes to have its London and Glasgow operations up and running.
Commenting on the expansion in the context of the Standard’s decline, Douglas McCabe, director of publishing at Enders Analysis, told City PM: “It’s impossible not to feel sad about the retreat of the Evening Standard as a great city newspaper of outstanding heritage.
“It all too elegantly illustrates some of the fears about local news droughts our research has been describing in recent years.
“A small, agile, journalism-focused service like The Mill is a sound idea, though London’s enormous footprint is both prize and challenge. “
The Mill was founded by former Tab editor Joshi Herrmann in 2020, and has been feted by many in the media for finding a new, successful model for regional journalism which has been suffering from a decades-long decline across the country.
But unlike many of its legacy rivals, the firm operates using a subscriber-based newsletter model, and places a premium on publishing fewer, more thoroughly reported pieces.
Its newsletters have 7,500 subscribers, most of whom pay £8.95 a month. It has a further 110,000 users signed up to its free emails and generates a small portion of its revenue through advertising.
Mill Media has not responded for a request to comment on its expansion.
This article has been updated from a previous version