We sat down with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. He discussed what an “overwhelmingly reader-driven” revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume
> The Mill launched in Manchester in 2020 on the bet that people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Six cities later it has around 13,000 paying subscribers and 175,000 on free lists > Founder Joshi Herrmann priced it at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged. Quality over volume only works if the price says so too > Advertising is about 5% of revenue, by choice. As Herrmann puts it, "if you're reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers" > Cities aren't chosen by market size or demographics. The determining factor is finding one person who loves the place and believes in narrative journalism, which outweighs picking a bigger city > Each city is expected to break even within two to three years, and Manchester and Sheffield already have. The funding came from individuals who care about journalism rather than funds with exit timelines
“Proper local journalism”
Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill in 2020 with a simple bet: people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Four years later, he’s got around 13,000 paying subscribers across six cities and is proving that the UK’s regional newspaper groups have been getting it wrong for two decades.
The Manchester Evening News was publishing stories about Piers Morgan. The Liverpool Echo was chasing whatever TV drama was trending that week. Across Britain’s major cities, regional newspapers that once employed hundreds of journalists and broke real stories had become traffic farms covered in programmatic ads, churning out whatever might get clicks.
“The executives in charge of these amazing media companies were trashing these brands so comprehensively and letting down local readers in the process,” Herrmann says. “That annoyed me, but it also felt like an opportunity to prove that they were doing it wrong.”
Trading ads for readers
“In local news in the UK, there had been a focus on advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue for a long time.” “The switch to digital had fundamentally been a switch from making most of your money in print from advertising to making most of your money from advertising in a digital setting. And I was aware that wasn’t working as a model.”
Go to any regional newspaper website, and you’d see the result. Dozens of stories that had nothing to do with the city. Websites plastered with terrible ads. Content designed purely to drive traffic volume rather than serve readers.
“If I thought that was an insane situation for a high-quality local newspaper,” Herrmann says, “then I knew that lots of other people would agree with me.”
Lockdown launch
The timing was accidental. Herrmann had been in the Czech Republic, planning to write a book about his family and the Holocaust. The pandemic killed that plan and he ended up back in the UK helping his sister and spending time in the garden and wondering what to do next.
