What is The Mill playing at?

Dear readers — every now and then we send a little bonus e-mail on a Sunday, where we talk a bit about how things work around here.

There are a couple of reasons we do this. Firstly, we’re picking up new people onto our free e-mail list all the time. There are now over 50,000 of you getting our stuff — far more than we could have hoped for a couple of years ago. Those who are longer in the tooth with us may be bored silly of hearing about why we’re doing what we’re doing — if that’s you, I will detain you no longer; please go, enjoy your Sunday! But we find it helps the newbies if we semi-regularly explain how our model works.

The second reason is to make a scarcely-veiled-at-all pitch to those of you who aren’t members yet to join us. It’s not exactly subliminal messaging — more of a barefaced ask for your cash. But by explaining how we work, I hope I can show you why membership really helps us to do what we want to do. (There may be a third reason this week, which is that I’m procrastinating from my urgent task of writing a best man’s speech, but we’ll leave that to one side).

In a typical week, The Mill sends out four newsletters. At the start, there are our Monday briefings, where we give you a round-up of the big stories over the weekend and tell you what’s going on that week (alas, tomorrow is a bank holiday, so this week you’ll have to fend for yourselves). And at the end are our Saturday long reads where we really dig into a topic — like our pieces on whether Pride should be a party or a protest, Manchester’s unsung nun Elizabeth Prout, and the shadowy forces behind the recent riots. These go out to everyone on our list — regardless of whether they pay to support us or not.

Then there are two mid-week editions. On Wednesday we send a newsletter directly to members only. These tend to be some of our most unusual and intriguing pieces — like this week’s feature about the Ohio janitor staking a bloodline claim to Manchester’s oldest building, Baguley Hall. (You’re in luck — we’ve just unlocked it, if you want to see what you missed). And then on Thursdays we send pieces that we paywall part way down, in our most naked bid to get you to join us.

So why do we do this weird mix? Well, let’s look at the two other options — making everything free, or making everything available for paid members only.

Of course, we would love to give all our journalism away for free. We believe it’s a public service, and want as many of the public to benefit from it as possible. 

But if we do everything for free, that leaves a rather awkward gap in our finances. After all, trained journalists deserve a good salary for their work, and offices in central Manchester aren’t exactly dirt cheap. If we didn’t want to face imminent closure, the only option left to us would be papering our columns in advertising, while doing everything to maximise the number of eyeballs looking at said adverts. That’s a sure-fire recipe for ugly, misleading news sites that trade on shock and celebrity tittle-tattle instead of what actually matters in Greater Manchester.

Making everything free online is the trap that a lot of local newspapers have fallen into over the last decade. Not only has it led them down the path of redundancies and diminishing quality, it also sends a rather strange message about their journalism: that ultimately, it really isn’t worth very much.

So why not swing to the other extreme, and make all of our content only available to those who pay? (After all, in the halcyon pre-internet era, no one would have expected to walk into a newsagents and pick up some parts of a newspaper for free). 

But we know that a local news subscription is something a lot of people just can’t afford. For some, the £8.95 a month we charge (or £7.42 if you pay for a year upfront) is too high. Call us hopeless dreamers, but we really want our journalism to actually change things, so it doesn’t make sense to hoard it all behind a paywall.

But please don’t let the fact we give some stuff away for free deceive you — we really need the support of paying members. In fact, if you can think for a moment of one article of ours that you’ve really appreciated, the only reason it was published is due to the 3,216 heroes who back our journalism the old fashioned way — with cold, hard cash. Just 6% of readers are funding the news that the other 94% receive.

So if you can’t afford to pay for us, please don’t feel any guilt and enjoy the free editions! But if you can afford to pay what is, after all, less than the cost of an Amazon Prime or Netflix subscription, can we ask you to dig deep, and do so? If people like you back us, we can keep growing our team and take on bigger stories. But if people like you don’t, then we won’t be around forever. 

Good journalism has never really been free — the only question is, do you value it?