Fix it. Fund it. Future-proof it.
We’re launching a new fundraising campaign today. All we need is 600 people. Are you in? 🗞️
In a nutshell …
Quality local journalism, once a cornerstone of the community, has been in decline for years. In an age of information overload, where seemingly anything goes – facts disputed, lies peddled, conspiracies left unchecked – we’re poorer for it.
Our Fix it. Fund it. Future-proof it. campaign seeks to offer an alternative. We believe that local news can be done slower and better. No agenda. No clicks. No nonsense. And all we need to help make this happen … just 600 kind folk like you.
Members. Supporters. Champions of the fourth estate. If that sounds like you …
🗞️ sign up as a member here 🗞️ sign up as a supporter here
Fire service rescues cat. Community hosts fair. Amateur football team loses match. Gardener grows massive vegetable. Man complains to council about neighbour's giant shed.
There was always a popular misconception, not entirely unfounded, that local newspapers tended to publish stories that were quaint, trivial or mundane. That if you wanted to read or learn about things that mattered, you were better off picking up a national tabloid or broadsheet.
Local newspapers, while a welcome, useful and seemingly permanent pillar of the community – like the social club, the church, the corner shop – had a sort of old world, provincial feel about them. It didn’t matter if you missed an edition. Somehow, someone would tell you what was going on in your backyard.
That’s how it felt to me. Growing up in the north-east, I was far more interested in flicking through the popular red tops and the quality press – and, of course, always starting with the sports pages at the back. The likes of the Evening Chronicle and The Journal, while they were household names – and readily available to me on the newsstand in my parents’ shop – didn’t interest me as much.
Looking back, maybe it was because the nationals opened me up to the rest of the world and widened my horizons, whereas the local press, possibly, felt insular, small town-ish and unimportant. Sometimes, without knowing it, you’re always trying to leave where you come from. After all, you can’t make a name for yourself if you stay put? That’s the sell, anyway.
The truth is that these stories matter. The humongous vegetable may be the headline, but what it’s actually about is how a community is growing more of its food locally in an enterprising way. The cat being rescued by a firefighter may seem charming at first, but it tells a different story – one about the local fire service being in a near-perpetual state of crisis.
Sometimes, these stories may just be as matter-of-fact as they sound. And that’s fine. They’re still worth telling because they still say something about a specific area at a particular point in time – and, perhaps more with hindsight, they help us shape our understanding of the milieu. As the 20th-century publisher of The Washington Post, Philip Graham is often quoted as saying, “journalism is the first rough draft of history”.
While these stories have long been a regular feature of local news output, local newspaper coverage has always been far more wide-ranging and impactful. By constantly holding power to account, rooting out corruption and righting many, many wrongs, they have, time after time, helped shore up inherently fragile democracies by printing stories that certain people or institutions – namely the subjects of these stories – have either done their best to keep hidden or underplay.
It’s this often misunderstood side of local newspapers that arguably best demonstrates why they matter, the difference they make as the fourth estate and the value they provide as purveyors of the truth. And it’s this type of journalism that is in crisis. In fact, it’s been this way for a long time now – to the detriment of everyone.
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The world doesn’t sit still. Nor do we, as humans. Never satisfied, always busy – distraction being the mother of existential dread – and in constant pursuit of satisfying a need for control (as modest as keeping one’s lawn bright green and neatly trimmed and as grandiose as meddling with the lives of the masses as a head of state), we remake and we remake and we remake. It’s how we get from the phonograph to the gramophone to the transistor radio to the walkman to the MP3 player to the music-playing smartphone, the one-stop shop of our screen-based lives. Same, same, but different.
That we’re an innovative species is a good thing – it sets us apart (at least to ourselves). Just look at how far we’ve come with healthcare, one of our most significant and ongoing endeavours. It’s humbling (although, that said, while we certainly live stronger, we don’t necessarily live healthier). But our capacity for genius, if you want to call it that, isn’t without its faults. It’s innately destructive. It destroys habitats. Culture. Industries. People. The local newspaper industry can attest to that.
The digitisation of news, the appification of attention and the online liberation of the means of print production and distribution have, while positively transforming and advancing the way local journalism is done, simultaneously upended an industry that has, while adapting to the times, remained fairly resilient to the unavoidable forces of change.
(To note, the digital revolution hasn’t been the only factor at play – while we all live locally, many of us live, work, travel and relax in ways that are less geographically contained. That disentanglement from the local, has also changed our relationship with local news and the local community. We may identify as local this, national that, but in many ways we’re the global other.)
The only difference with this latest upheaval, some decades in the making, is that while local newspapers have adjusted to this new way of life (with one eye now very much fixed towards the horizon to see what’s coming next – we’re looking at you AI), this time around they haven't been able to fully recover. The industry today is a lot poorer than it has ever been, both literally and figuratively. Consequently, so too are the communities they serve.
In some areas, local newspapers don't even exist. According to the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), just shy of five million people in the UK live in so-called news deserts, “defined as areas lacking a dedicated local news outlet”. That’s a sizeable chunk of the population without a professional journalistic outfit whose core mission is to act in the public interest.
Even where local newspapers do hang on – now very much digital first, print second (if at all) – those who are able to maintain their independence do so as comparably depleted, hollowed out organisations making very little money (which is why you can begin to understand how more than 300 local papers went bust between 2009 and 2019), while those who are absorbed into the networks of bigger publishing giants (for instance, the top 25 regional digital newsbrands, as described by Press Gazette, is pretty much exclusively dominated by Reach-owned titles), – with a more centralised and homogenised local operation – seem to pander to algorithmic whims (aka the new gatekeepers) by hastily churning clickbaity tosh en masse (with a good number of stories lacking any local angle) and littering their poorly designed websites with irritating ads.
The consequence? Less time, money and resource is spent on more labour-intensive and expensive investigative journalism, with fewer journalists attending council meetings, covering the courts, getting out and about in the community, too.
Moreover, the competition for local audiences, for people’s time, is even fiercer, with the regional press now, in effect, competing with non-local online newspapers, magazines, brands, businesses, personalities, and countless keyboard warriors in an ever fragmented media landscape where those that play by the rules lose out to those who aren’t bound by the same journalistic training, standards or mentality (for good and bad).
Welcome to the attention economy, where, despite having unfettered access to an infinite volume of information, we seem more ignorant than ever (because it is indeed bliss).
With everyone constantly plugged into their smartphones, that dependable and indefatigable gateway to the infinite bliss of digital nirvana, where there is no shortage of free and alternative sources of news and, maybe more importantly to the consumer (replacing the Freduian superego of the citizen) endless entertainment on literal tap, increasingly curated by algorithms (we don’t need to actively look for things, we now just passively consume things), or a hybrid of the two – call it entertain-news – who really has time for local newspapers? Who even cares?
As the American historian Timothy Snyder put it in a 2018 interview with E-International Relations: “When local news goes away, then our sense of what is true shifts from what is helpful to us in our daily lives to what makes us 'feel good', which is something entirely different.”
That superficial, fleeting feeling of goodness, as well as the promise of more of it, is all we have to hold onto or hope for because there isn’t anything else out there to look forward to. We have stalled as a nation and our economy has long been sick.
Sans any material or meaningful improvements in their lives, in a post-truth, deep-fake, AI-generated age of outrage and conspiracy theories, people instead find themselves reaping the psychological benefits that come with gobbling up feel-good, dopamine-rich lies that are packaged up into accessible and beautiful slogans (see, for example, Daniel Trilling reading Richard Seymour in the London Review of Books). We have our work cut out.
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A community that loses its ability to properly understand, interrogate, participate and challenge individuals and institutions that have influence over their lives, from councillors and local authorities to CEOs and private enterprises, ends up being less informed, more divided and democratically deficient. It becomes angrier, more atomised and impoverished. It fractures, weakens and turns inwards, away from the truth, from others and civic participation.
That ability is a free and thriving local press that has the skills, tools, money, talent and time to be more present and able to observe, reflect, question and dig and dig and dig. It’s fair to say this isn’t the case anymore. As a King’s College London report from as far back as 2016 concluded, titled Monopolising local news, an increase in online readership hasn’t seen a return to a better, healthier calibre of local reportage:
“It has not been accompanied by an increase in the on-the-ground reporting of local news. There are not more journalists covering local councils, courts, schools or hospitals. In fact, there are indications that far fewer journalists are doing this. Consequently, there has been no increase in the (already diminished) public interest journalism reaching these increased readerships.”
Instead, people now get a more diluted form of local news – still of some value and still informative, but not always driven by a true sense of journalistic duty to publish stories that someone, somewhere does not want published, as George Orwell sort of put it (although, maybe there’s a semantic difference between journalism and news, but that’s a story for another day).
You could say then that local newspapers today function more as noticeboards, if not as magazines (and when we say newspapers, we mean digital outfits). Stories that are of public interest feature less on these noticeboards. There’s also less focus on what’s happening locally, hence “stories” about celebrities, bargain highstreet purchases, health, lifestyle and international politics.
West Country Voices, which describes itself as a “regional online newspaper powered by citizen journalism”, summed this up nicely in a 2024 piece by its editor, Philippa Davies, titled Ultra-processed news – why local journalism has gone weird:
“[People are] being fed a diet of ultra-processed news. A production line of stories formulated and packaged to appeal to a mass market, offering the instant gratification of junk food – or generated by a processor that churns out cheap, synthetic, low-quality fare. Either way, this is something that benefits the manufacturer – not the consumer.”
Local news is in crisis. Well, to be more exact and accurate – and because a particular type of local news (see above) is doing relatively well, at least for now (and more so in the eyes of the properties, the shareholders) – local news that is in the public interest, aka investigative journalism and campaigning journalism, as the 2019 Cairncross Review put it, is in crisis.
This fact is recognised by the government. By nonprofits. By academics. By the newspaper industry as a whole. And by media bigwigs, like Mark Thompson, currently chairman and CEO of CNN – and formerly of the BBC, formerly of Channel 4, formerly of the New York Times (quite the CV) – who said in 2019 that “the UK and its constituent nations need a comprehensive rescue plan for local and regional journalism – no western country has cracked this yet”.
Six years later, the same is true – the struggle continues, as the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has often reported. For example, the number of people willing to pay for news in the UK, compared to other countries, remains very low (8% versus 11% in France, 22% in the US and 40% in the Norway), trust has dropped significantly over the past decade (from 51% in 2015 to 35% in 2025) and news avoidance has increased with the UK experiencing some of the highest levels globally (46% compared to 63% in Bulgaria, where it’s very high, to 11% in Japan, where it’s very low).
People have swapped local news – as well as forgotten about it, never given it the time of day or have not known it even know that it has existed – for social media, where the rigours of journalism (fact checking, accuracy, craft) are decidedly lacking. This is where a lot of people get their news (if at all), with internet news-based personalities experiencing an upswing in interest and popularity (which, in itself, isn’t a bad thing).
It’s part of a bigger shift in media, with a recent WPP forecast suggesting that user-generated content is starting to encroach on professional production, “with more than half of content-driven advertising revenue” to come from platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
But, even in the face of such adversity and competition, local newspapers that want to pursue a different approach – one grounded in classic journalistic sensibilities but remade for the online world of the 21st century (possibly with one or two feet in print as well/alternatively, because, when everything is digital, the pull of old tech, with modern-day bells and whistles, begins to make even more sense) – have every reason to be hopeful.
There are plenty of good stories out there about independent local news organisations that are, in their own way, doing very well. Like the oft-cited Mill Media. The Bristol Cable. The Edinburgh Minute. Ipswich.co.uk. The London Centric. It’s inspiring. It gives us hope. We want to be part of that movement – and, with your help, we believe that we can.
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Today we’re launching our first-ever – “ambitiously modest” – fundraising campaign. The goal? To be able to fund our work for the next year and professionalise our operations so that come July 2026, we’ll have established The Ilkley Journal as West Yorkshire’s primary source of high-quality, long-form, slow journalism: Fix it. Fund it. Future-proof it.
The model is broken and needs fixing – we have shown since April 2024 how it can and should be done. Funding is a prerequisite for pure economic sustainability. Without it, as we noted when we marked our first anniversary, our publication remains a labour of love. And together, with the journalists fixing it, the subscribers and supporters (in large part) funding it, we can secure the future of local news in Ilkley and beyond.
All it requires is just 600 people. Six hundred people who genuinely believe in the importance of local news. In facts. In stories. In the joy of reading well-crafted, original and stimulating journalism that is human-made (and what a thing it is to have to write that). Six hundred people who can afford to make a small but seismic investment of just £50 per person.
It’s a small number of people – just 4% of Ilkley’s population, 0.11% of the population of the Bradford District, 0.03% of the population of West Yorkshire and 0.00088% of the population of the UK. Tiny sums, but big enough for us to make our second year as a local online newspaper one that we can look back on in the not-so-distant future as being one of our most formative.
The funding we raise will primarily go towards enabling commissioning more writers, spending more time scrutinising and investigating individuals, organisations, and local government, and expanding our reach and revenue through increased marketing.
In short, it’ll help us move away from being a side gig to a full, proper, respected and, dare we say it, feared news organisation. On top of that, as a nice-to-have, we’ll also be looking at ways we can improve and complement our written output with illustrations, design, photographs and video content – across our website and on social media – and other ways to diversify our revenue streams.
It’s our hope that with your backing – you as one of 600 members and supporters (more on what we mean by this below) – the next 12 months will see The Ilkley Journal do its best to produce some of the best pieces of (slow) journalism in the region, if not the country, and to have in place the team, talent, revenue and backing we need to confidently continue in our endeavours for the foreseeable future.
We see our members as our loyal readers, our audience, locals who are more directly affected by what goes on in the area, who want access to better-quality local journalism and who want to help make that happen for others, too. In contrast, we see our supporters as local news champions, individual backers who don’t necessarily live or work in our neck of the woods but who nevertheless value what we’re doing and, as with members, also want to play a role in helping The Ilkley Journal and the local news industry flourish. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that (thanks Gandhi).
So, as we wrap up this piece, as we kick off a month-long campaign to give us a fighting chance – with emotions that are a mix of nervousness, uncertainty and excitement – all that is left to say is what will your number be? 2/600? 45/600? 345/600? 600/600? To find out, sign up today.
If you're interested in becoming a member, tap on this link (effectively a discounted version of our annual subscription with a free book thrown in for good measure). If you’re more suited to being a supporter, you can donate here (we’ll also give you a free book if you want one).
Fix it. Fund it. Future-proof it. The Ilkley Journal. Local news done slower and better.
The editor