Do we just have to shrug our shoulders?

When I took my seat on a solid wooden bench at the back of the room, the chief executive of the Guardian was speaking. Next to her, facing a committee of peers from the House of Lords, were senior executives from The Financial Times, the Daily Mail group and News UK, owner of The Times and The Sun. We had been summoned to Committee Room 3 in the Houses of Parliament to answer a pressing question: what is the future of journalism?

The newspaper executives all sounded polished, no doubt from long experience handling such occasions. They knew how to get their points across and, despite representing very different media outlets, how to sound extremely collegiate.

I, on the other hand, having never appeared at anything like this, did not know such things. I’m usually confident about public speaking but sitting on that bench, I felt nervous. The peers on this House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee included Lord Tony Hall, the former director general of the BBC — these people knew their stuff. After a while, the national newspaper bosses finished their evidence, and I was called forward alongside three other witnesses representing local media.

In the weeks since, I’ve wondered whether my habit of being combative in situations where there is absolutely no need for it was responsible for what happened next, or whether I was right to pick this fight. Either way, the consensual atmosphere was soon punctured when we were asked to outline the current state of local news in the UK.

Sitting next to me was the chief executive of Newsquest (the largest local news company by number of titles, including the Bolton News and Bury Times) and a senior executive from Reach Plc (the largest by number of readers, owners of the MEN and national newspapers like the Daily Express). Both men told a positive story: local journalism was facing challenges, yes, but their companies had grown massive online audiences and they were optimistic about the future.

I had a different take. For one thing, local media has been a bloodbath of never-ending layoffs for my entire adult life. According to one recent estimate by Press Gazette, the three largest local media companies now employ around 3,000 local journalists, down from around 9,000 in 2007. I talked about the virtually unreadable local news websites, filled with celebrity stories and headlines about Martin Lewis “warning” us of various things, a clickbait format described by Lewis himself as “newspapers writing up my TV appearances rather than paying journalists to do journalism”. 

I mentioned the growing phenomenon of “zombie newspapers” — previously proud local titles that now have little or no local journalism and instead fill up their pages with press releases, national “content” or stories from other towns. I pointed to the example of my mum’s local town, which used to have two newspapers with offices on the high street. Both had dozens of pages of news stories, sports reports, history pieces and photos of local life. Then the newspapers merged. And now that remaining newspaper, owned by one of the companies run by the men sitting next to me, is a sad shell of what it was; with one or two pages about the town, followed by irrelevant filler.

Many of you reading this will have seen the same thing happen to your local newspapers in Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire, most of which have been gutted beyond recognition if they haven’t disappeared entirely.

By this point, the committee of peers had picked up the tension in front of them. Not only were our answers wildly different, but I had utterly failed to disguise my feelings as the men next to me presented a picture of digital innovation rather than spectacular decline. “Mr Herrmann, you looked extremely annoyed at the contributions to your right a few minutes ago,” observed Lord McNally, a former advisor to James Callaghan.

I regret looking annoyed, but I think there’s no point avoiding reality: local news is so obviously in crisis in this country and that has major implications for local democracy, local economies and how people connect to their local areas and to each other. It’s perhaps a testament to the PR skill and lobbying power of the large local news companies that there has been so little public outcry. And yet, just in the past couple of months, I sense that is changing.

About 20 minutes into the House of Lords session, the committee’s chair Baroness Stowell told the execs next to me that she was confused by the discrepancy between their sunny answers and what her committee had seen and heard from others. “I’m just a bit baffled, by the picture you are painting about the success of your businesses when the challenge seems to be around the quality of the content,” she said.

That gave me heart. And then, as I was on holiday with my girlfriend in Romania this week, one of you emailed me to say that I should read William Hague’s column in The Times. Opening the app, I was astonished: the former Tory leader had written the strongest piece I’ve ever read from a politician about what he called the “scene of utter devastation” in local news. Hague wrote about local journalists “reduced to recycling police press releases and social media clickbait”. He pointed out that, during this year’s general election, “few of the candidates will need to worry about an authoritative local paper holding them to account.”

The suspicion among my friends that I had ghost-written this column for Hague was given further credence when he cited The Mill and our sister titles as a “cause for hope” because of our “well-researched and original reporting”. But I promise I had no part in it. The idea that this is a massive societal problem seems to be catching on.

It was only last month that Bernie Sanders, one of the most recognisable politicians on the planet, visited our office on St Ann’s Square and described the collapse of local news as a “disaster for democracy.” I can’t think of many points of agreement between Hague and Sanders, but on this, they are both sounding the same alarm.

Not long before Bernie’s visit, two of the legendary Fleet Street editors of our time, former FT editor Lionel Barber and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, invited The Mill’s brilliant senior editor Sophie Atkinson and me onto their podcast. It’s one thing for media titans like these to take an interest in a tiny media venture launched less than four years ago and it’s quite another for them to describe what we’re doing as “inspiring” and “fantastic”. Or as Rusbridger put it: “The Manchester Guardian, my old paper, started as a startup in Manchester with 11 backers, and look where it is now.”

I’m writing this today because taken together, all these things feel like a significant moment. When I started The Mill, the crisis in local news was causing widespread alarm in the US but it had barely registered as a major story in this country. But just in the past month, it looks like that is changing. Cracks can be heard up the valley; the glacier is starting to move.

It presents an unusual opportunity. Firstly, there’s the chance to persuade policymakers to do some simple things that will offer what Hague calls “a fair chance for new ideas in local media”. It’s obvious that the corporate owners are only going in one direction: relentlessly cutting costs to maintain profit margins for shareholders. To enable a wave of innovation and renewal led by new players in the market, like us and the Bristol Cable and dozens of smaller outlets that have started in recent years, the government should: 

• Reform the rules governing public notices (statutory adverts about planning, licensing etc.), which currently specify they must be delivered in print based on an archaic definition from the 19th century, so more independent and digital publications can get a fair chunk of more than £40m annual revenue.

• Redirect government advertising spending so that important public messages reach highly engaged audiences like you and public money doesn’t prop up corporately owned zombie newspapers.

• Legislate to protect media companies from so-called SLAPPs (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), so that they can’t be bullied into silence by spurious lawsuits from the big companies and wealthy individuals they are reporting on.

If someone you know works in parliament, I would love your help in getting these messages across. I’m also incredibly grateful to all of our more than 2,800 paying members of The Mill, whose subscriptions and support have allowed us to get to the point where we can take a leading role in charting a better future for local journalism.

If you’re not a Mill member yet, my pitch to you is this. When I started this on my own in the early days of the pandemic, no one was watching. The first email went out to 23 people, most of whom were either close friends or blood relatives, and experts I saw tweeting about us online gave us very little chance of making it to the end of the year.

Now, less than four years later, people are paying attention in a way I never could have predicted. Bernie Sanders, William Hague, the former editors of the Guardian and the FT, a committee of peers — it’s all quite lucky and extraordinary. And while they are watching, I want them to see that good quality local journalism funded by readers really does have a future.

That means a future for a brand of journalism that embraces nuance rather than reductive partisan hectoring; an approach that appreciates the joy of storytelling and that knows that to truly understand a place, you need to know as much about its plays and books and cultural life as you do about its councils and courts. I want people to see that our media can deliver more than endless fear-mongering push notifications about horrible crimes; that it can inspire people to feel close to their communities and closer to each other.

“In most of Britain, local news is hollowed out and on the verge of extinction,” wrote William Hague in his column. “Do we just have to shrug our shoulders?” By joining us as a member, you’ll not only get access to a whole world of brilliant subscriber-only journalism. You will be one of the happy few citizens looking a major national crisis in the face and not shrugging your shoulders.