The path that led Joshi Herrmann to build a fledgling media empire in the United Kingdom was anything but conventional.
Rather than climbing the traditional ladder from local papers to national newsrooms, Herrmann graduated from Cambridge in 2011 and began his career at major outlets like The Evening Standard and Tab Media.
But a journalism conference after Donald Trump’s first election — and the bleak predictions for local news he heard there — prompted Herrmann to rethink the future of local journalism.
“I had this feeling that it couldn’t be true. Surely, the market can provide some great local journalism in cities, even if it can’t provide exactly what we had before,” Herrmann said. “So that’s when I thought I’d give it a go. Rather than trying to get a philanthropic grant, I’d try to get people to pay for journalism.”
Herrmann’s motives weren’t solely altruistic — he felt the United Kingdom’s national media market was already saturated and strong enough. And he had always liked writing about cities, what he called “the most important unit in the modern world.”
Still, the decision to pivot didn’t come immediately. After leaving Tab Media to freelance in 2019, Herrmann watched the pandemic and the rise of platforms like Substack create new opportunities — and decided it was time to make his move.
Journalism models had long been predicated on the idea that more was more — a “critical mass of content,” as Herrmann put it, was the best way to attract subscribers. But Substack offered an entirely different model: pay $5 or $10 a month to read a limited amount of content, usually two or three newsletter editions a week. The model’s quick ascension among journalists like Anne Helen Petersen, Hunter Harris and Casey Newton (who has since left) proved that things could be done differently and still be successful. The company takes 10% of subscription revenue as a fee.
Manchester Mill editor and founder Joshi Herrmann (Courtesy: Dani Cole)
So, in June 2020, Herrmann wrote his first story as employee No. 1 — and the only employee — of The Mill, with this Hunter S. Thompson-esque headline: “My long afternoon trying to verify a viral video of a racist attack on a Chinese takeaway.” The story begins, as you can imagine, with a video that had been circulating of an English man attempting to punch through the screen separating the employees of a local Chinese to-go restaurant from the public.
This is a typical set-up for news stories, as so much of modern news content is determined by what goes viral, but Herrmann’s approach made the story stand out. Rather than simply report the video’s existence, and that it may have taken place in the greater Manchester area, Herrmann set out to verify that the video did, in fact, happen in Manchester and then, perhaps more surprisingly, detail his process.
“For the hardcore Millers,” he writes, “I’m going to outline how I got there, because I think it illustrates an interesting point about how much time and effort you sometimes have to invest to verify something that is spreading so effortlessly online.”
Herrmann started The Mill with a loose deadline in mind: Try this for a month. See how it goes.
“It was a little bit of an eccentric idea,” he said, “one person writing one long-form story per week and seeing if people will like that. But in the first month, there was one comment in particular on Facebook: ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for so long.’”
Within a few months, the interest was clear: 4,000 people had signed up for The Mill. By the time Herrmann turned on paid subscriptions, around four months after launch, it only took a few weeks for roughly 10% of that number to put their money toward the product.
Still, while Herrmann may have made a name in London media, it didn’t mean that The Mill was well-known to all. As a Substack operation, then not even the behemoth it is today, the now-editor of Mill Media sometimes had to reason with local officials who didn’t understand why a one-man email newsletter was asking for more data on COVID-19, for example, than the local newspaper.
“People who had only just heard of it — well, it sounded a little quixotic,” he said. “Fortunately, when you start something on your own, you do really believe it’s kind of an important thing. You can be quite persuasive.”
That strategy paid off. Within a year, Herrmann had buy-in from not just the public but from Substack’s internal operation. In June 2021, The Mill was announced as one of only 12 recipients of the platform’s local news grant, netting the organization roughly 100,000 pounds. That vote of confidence pushed Herrmann to expand: He had already started Liverpool-based The Post and was then able to open a similar outpost in Sheffield.
Three years later, these expansions have grown ample audiences — The Sheffield Tribune boasts more than 2,000 paying subscribers while The Liverpool Post has roughly 1,750, Herrmann said. In August 2023, Herrmann announced that he had raised roughly 350,000 pounds in total from a variety of investors, including Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN worldwide. (Per a Guardian report, the company was valued at 1.75 million pounds by investors, who purchased “less than 20%” of the parent company for the given sum.) In total, Mill Media, now comprising four publications and two more in the works — in London and Glasgow — has 12 full-time reporters, with plans to hire 11 additional staffers by the end of 2024.
Prior to the announcement of the London and Glasgow newsletters, Herrmann said that the business was cash-flow positive, with staffing and operational expenses paid solely through reader revenue. The influx of 350,000 pounds has enabled Mill to grow even more.
The typical Mill Media story is one where effort and interest coincide. Herrmann lists success stories ranging from the literal sauce behind Manchester’s most popular chicken shop to a Michelin-starred chef’s toxic workplace behavior. There may be no secret formula, other than what Herrmann calls a “certain storytelling component.”
“That’s something that’s been lost in the UK media. People don’t just want to be updated on things — they’re not just robots who want to be briefed,” he said. “They want to feel something and have emotion in it as well as focus on storytelling that is more reminiscent of American magazine culture than of the U.S. news culture.”
Herrmann’s approach toward this type of news coverage is not only self-interested (I want to write these stories) or moralistic (I think these stories matter), it’s borne out in the data. Mill Media has found a “strong correlation” between the amount of time put into a story and how well it performs online, an ideal causal relationship that, for many media organizations, is hard to crack. Industry leaders say that what Herrmann has created with Mill Media may be the “outlines of a new model of local news provision.”
“The new model is a very small team with a very clear commitment to doing original journalism that is distinct and focused on a particular locale,” said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. “It is often, but not always, based on convincing a small, meaningful number of people to pay for that journalism, either in the form of subscription or membership.”
Could Mill Media offer a useful model for American publications, which have to grapple with a much wider geographical territory?
The UK and U.S. local news markets are not so different, Nielsen said. In both countries, local newspapers are still “the most widespread sources” of local news, although they tend to be more regional than hyperlocal. An example like Herrmann’s Mill Media presents some emerging principles: Start with journalism that’s worth paying for, with original reporting and a clear editorial identity, Nielsen said.
It’s also another example of the value of “meeting people where they are.” For The Mill, that means sending newsletters in a consistent enough way that creates a habit for readers.
Still, creating a news consumption habit — one that people will pay for — is no easy feat in a climate where fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for news or even read it.
In 2014, roughly a quarter of people in the UK said they had used a local newspaper. But in 10 years, that number is down by half — at 12% in 2024. That’s true across a variety of age brackets, from the youngest respondents to those 55 and over, generally considered to be the traditional audience.
What is not comparable between the UK’s news market and the U.S. is people’s willingness to pay for news. Out of 20 countries in which the Reuters Institute tracks payment for news, the UK scores relatively low, due in part to its competitive national news market in which the vast majority of news providers offer their content for free. This point offers a hopeful take: If Herrmann could get Brits to pay for news in a country that is not used to it historically, then what success might this model have in America?
The answer perhaps isn’t far off. Another recipient of the aforementioned Substack Local News grants, the Arizona Agenda, is on its way to starting a similar network of local email newsletters, with the launch last year of the Tucson Agenda. Created in 2021 as a newsletter covering state politics, the Arizona Agenda is on track to make $250,000 in subscription revenue this year, according to co-founder Hank Stephenson. There’s a sense of relief seeping in — the slow months can be survived, people can be hired for administrative tasks, and perhaps, one day soon, the Agenda can even bring on an additional reporter. But reaching that point hasn’t been easy.
“We are burned out. It is still a struggle to keep going at this pace every single day, but financially, we have hit all of our goals,” Stephenson said. “I would have never guessed that this thing could go this far, and now I see a path continuing to grow not only with subscriptions but leaning into other potential revenue sources.”
Those sources include earnings from events, advertising, newsletter sponsorships and grants. The success of the Tucson Agenda, a local newsletter focused on the city’s government and politics, has inspired confidence in its eventual replication. The newsletter boasts more than 700 paid subscribers in less than a year, per co-founder Curt Prendergast, the former opinion editor at the Arizona Daily Star. That paper’s gradual descent — a familiar story in local journalism — led to the creation of the Tucson Agenda.
“A lot of people would like local news and local government and politics coverage that is easy to understand, and they will pay for that,” Prendergast said. “There are so many people who are just dying to give their money to people who are doing the work they want done.”
Structurally, Stephenson notes, the Agendas have an interesting model. Both Tucson and Arizona are funneled through separate companies, of which Stephenson is the common link. But journalistically, the staff starts each day with a 9:30 a.m. phone call, discussing their priorities for the day and ensuring there is no overlap.
Now, at a pivotal growth point, Stephenson brought on consultant Dan Oshinsky, the owner of Inbox Collective. As the former director of newsletters at The New Yorker, he knows what makes a newsletter work. His first rule is clear: Always be sure to have a specific audience in mind.
“The Mill is a great example of this — they have original features, deep dives and help people figure out big-picture trends,” Oshinsky said. “The newsletter is built to serve the audience in the way that we intend — it’s not just email as a delivery system, but email as an engagement tool.”
Newsletter leaders hire Oshinsky in part, he said, because of growing pains. Many of them have to answer “bigger existential questions” around the future of their business. Ground zero is easy, at least as it relates to the philosophical sticking points: Determine who you want to serve and how you want to serve them.
But many newsletters “expand beyond a point they could have really imagined,” Oshinsky said. And that’s when the inevitable next question arises, one asked by startups the world over and also by Mill Media and the Arizona Agenda: to scale or not to scale?
In any business venture, there comes a time when the company must decide whether to expand and grow — simply put, scale or not to scale. Some media companies make the decision to focus on their community and their mission and invest where they are. Others may opt to replicate their model on a larger scale, in another city or over a span of cities — if something works once, why can’t it work multiple times?
Nielsen starts from an important principle: “I don’t think there is a single right or wrong way to do this.”
Still, he noted that scale in media was historically not pursued out of “a journalistic aspiration” but generally as a way for newspaper conglomerates to leverage the debt of individual properties for shareholder profit. Even examples in new media that chose to expand aggressively, like BuzzFeed and Vice, Nielsen noted, haven’t often done so successfully.
In the newsletter space, Oshinsky pointed to Morning Brew as an example of successful expansion at almost epic proportions. The daily email newsletter started as a PDF newsletter for University of Michigan students on daily business news in 2014 to more than four million subscribers and 262 employees in 2022, per the newsletter’s site.
But Morning Brew is a national business newsletter, not exactly comparable with local news markets. And Stephenson succinctly noted that the Agendas “don’t want to be the next Morning Brew.”
“That is naturally the lowest common denominator of what’s interesting and appealing to the masses,” he said. “We don’t want to be appealing to everyone — we want to be very appealing to some people.”
Deciding whether to scale comes down to a number of internal questions, Oshinsky said. Part of that involves deciding how ambitious leaders are willing to be and how much legwork they’re able to do.
And while many independent news outlets have relied on philanthropic funding in recent years, Nielsen noted that the interests and values of these organizations “wax and wane.”
“It’s really important that journalists think about and care about whether there are business models that support quality local reporting,” he said.
The Manchester Mill team in the office. (Courtesy: Manchester Mill)
For Herrmann, none of these questions required much hand-wringing. His Twitter direct messages and email inbox are full of journalists asking him if he would ever consider opening a newsletter in their neck of the woods. He envisions a future within a few years in which Mill Media is “really large and influential” and publishing journalism in more than its current markets.
“I could 100% have stayed in Manchester, but that’s not the kind of person that I am,” he said, adding. “I’m ambitious about making it as big as possible and the journalism as big as possible, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do things.”
Prendergast is similarly optimistic about what the future might hold for the Agendas. He’s also hopeful that what the Tucson Agenda has learned in less than a year of operation can help aspiring local counterparts.
“This is a model that can be replicated across the country,” Prendergast said. “The key to it is that you get reporters who are professional and have a community of people that want coverage of their local government and politics.”
Maybe it comes down to the purpose of local news — its raison d’être. For many, the driving force for maintaining local news, for ensuring its existence, centers on democracy. But there’s another intangible that propels, in some form, Mill Media: the life force of community.
“There’s this harder-to-define thing of people knowing who lives around them in a place and feeling a sense of empathy and solidarity for social cohesion and feeling connected to each other,” Herrmann said. “Local journalism has played an important role in those processes.”
