Tuesday 17th October: The Mill is not going to solve the local news problem on its own

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Former Reach executive and recent podcast guest Jacqui Merrington has been writing in her newsletter about local news. To be exact, she’s writing about the decline of local news. Citing problems from the area where she lives - from school playing-field sell offs to seweage - she writes: “None of these issues are regularly and consistently scrutinised which means landowners, developers, councils and water companies can, to a greater or lesser extent, get away with it.”

She retells a tale we know too well; local newsrooms that don’t have the reporting teams they once had because the revenue once provided by print circulation, classifieds and advertising has ‘migrated to the big tech platforms.’ We can quibble about the big-tech narrative, but not about the lack of money to fund proper local news coverage.

What is most interesting about Jacqui’s take is her call for local news organisations, big and small, to work together. “What if, instead of treating each other as rivals, local journalists and media organisations collaborated in pursuit of brilliant, sustainable journalism to serve their communities?” I’m genuinely looking forward to the responses from both ends of the spectrum.

It’s not the job of this newsletter to comment on the rights and wrongs of the fighting in Israel and Gaza. It is important, however, to highlight the sacrifice made by journalists reporting on the conflict, the most deadly for journalists since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using information primarily from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Press Gazette is reporting the casualty count since Saturday October 7th. Sadly, there are likely to be updates.

Wired is reporting that print-proto-blog The Whole Earth Catalog is available online in its entirety for the first time. Wired says that when it was first printed in the late 1960s, the periodical had a profound impact on Silicon Valley’s ethos, and is credited with seeding the ideas that helped fuel today’s startup culture. And now you can read it all online for free.

The Grub Street Gang was at The International Magazine Centre’s Magazine Street conference in Edinburgh earlier this month. Editorial director Joanna Cummings was there to put together the conference magazine, ‘Word on the Street’ and here she’s sharing the big themes she identified from the interviews she did for the publication and the day’s presentations and workshops.

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