The subscription strategy behind one of Britain’s fastest-growing local news startups
Joshi Herrmann explained how Mill Media produces highly differentiated journalism.
When Mill Media launched the Manchester Mill in 2020, it was built around a premise that ran counter to much of modern local media strategy: that readers would happily pay for fewer stories, as long as those stories felt truly valuable.
At the time, local journalism in the UK was suffering through many of the same problems facing regional newsrooms in the United States. Newspapers had shrunk dramatically after years of collapsing advertising revenue. Newsrooms that once employed dozens or even hundreds of journalists were operating with skeletal staffs. Coverage became thinner, more rushed, and increasingly optimized for traffic rather than depth.
Founder Joshi Herrmann believed audiences had noticed.
“The local newspapers still exist,” he said, “but they are a very pale shadow of what they used to be.”
In many cities, he argued, local papers had become what he called “ghost newspapers.” “You have a newspaper that is still operating,” he explained, “but it doesn’t have any original journalism in it. Or if it does, it has one or two pages of original journalism and the rest is aggregated.”
Rather than trying to outcompete those publications on volume, Herrmann decided to move in the opposite direction. He launched a publication built around deeply reported longform stories, a relatively low publishing cadence, and a direct subscription relationship with readers. Four years later, Mill Media operates six city-based publications across the UK and has amassed tens of thousands of paying subscribers.
The company’s success has turned it into one of the clearest case studies for how local journalism might rebuild itself after the collapse of the traditional newspaper business.
Betting on Differentiation Instead of Volume
Before launching the Manchester Mill, Herrmann had worked in journalism for years, including stints at London’s Evening Standard and the startup Tab Media. But he had never worked extensively in local journalism, and in many ways that outsider perspective shaped the product he eventually built.
“I wanted to create a form of local journalism that didn’t feel like conventional local journalism,” he said.
The idea crystallized during the pandemic. Herrmann had been planning to write a book about his family history and the Holocaust, but COVID restrictions made archival research across Europe impossible. Suddenly needing a new project, he returned to the UK and began thinking seriously about newsletters.
At that point, he had already spent about a year watching the rise of Substack. What fascinated him was not merely the technology, but the economics.
“The big insight about Substack,” he said, “was if I’m willing to pay five bucks a month for someone to only send me two articles a week, and I’m also paying five bucks a month for the New York Times which sends me like 120 articles a day, then that’s a very dramatic shift in the value proposition.”
That realization led him to a broader conclusion about media pricing in the subscription era.
“As long as your content is very different to what else is out there,” he said, “people will give you much more money per word, or much more money per story or edition, than they would be willing to give a national newspaper.”
That logic seemed particularly applicable to local journalism. Most local newspapers had become heavily commoditized, focused on rapid-fire updates, search traffic, and inexpensive content production. Herrmann believed there was room for something slower and more immersive.
“I thought there is a lack of in-depth writing about Manchester,” he said. “The major local newspaper is still going, but it’s not producing that kind of work.”
His inspiration came less from traditional metro newspapers and more from American magazine journalism. He admired the sort of deeply reported narrative features published by longform magazines and wondered whether readers might support a local version of that approach.
The problem, of course, was scale.
Herrmann was launching alone. He could not produce dozens of stories a week. Initially, the publication would only publish one or two stories weekly. The entire business model depended on a simple premise: “The whole assumption,” he said, “was: will people pay a good amount of money every month… for a very low number of stories about their city if those stories are very, very good?”
Launching During the Pandemic
The Manchester Mill launched during the summer of 2020. In the beginning, everything was free.
Herrmann published a mix of longform feature stories, investigations, and essays explaining his broader vision for local journalism. One early story examined the life of an escaped enslaved man who later settled in northern England. Another investigated inconsistencies surrounding a widely discussed local crime incident.
At the same time, the pandemic created an unexpected editorial opportunity.
Local audiences desperately wanted reliable information about COVID, but much coverage felt sensationalized or optimized for clicks. Herrmann began publishing data-driven local COVID briefings that synthesized public health information and explained local trends in a calm, analytical way.
“People wanted accurate local information,” he said. “They liked the fact that I was presenting it in a kind of data-led way rather than trying to hype them up into clicking on a link.”
The approach resonated quickly. Within four months, the publication had roughly 4,000 email subscribers. More importantly, readers appeared emotionally invested in the idea of the publication itself.
Herrmann remembers receiving messages from readers saying things like, “I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for ages.”
That feedback gave him confidence to introduce paid subscriptions.
The initial conversion rate was striking. Roughly 10% of readers converted into paying subscribers almost immediately. For a local news startup with virtually no institutional backing, it was unusually strong validation.