Behind Local News Weekly: Inside the Bristol Cable’s race to land £40k

Hello,

Warm words from ministers about local newspapers have never been in short supply — but when the new culture secretary singles out a paper in her maiden speech while setting out her vision for the future, is it time to hope that Lisa Nandy will be the culture secretary who backs up praise with action?

Certainly, the fact that, during a relatively short speech in front of 150 from across the organisations which work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, there was any mention of local news at all is a huge positive.

Here’s what Lisa Nandy said:

“From Granada TV and its pioneering journalism, whether the campaign to free the Birmingham Six to the persistent approach to telling the story of Hillsborough and achieving justice for the 96 — to today’s Manchester Evening News that has defied the odds to become one of the most groundbreaking papers in the country and reminds us all why local and regional papers matter so much.”

In a world where it rarely feels as though a day goes by without the established local press being written off or demeaned, and with challenges to the funding model coming from tech giants and the BBC’s expansionist plans, Ms Nandy’s words feel like good news.

Our full report on Ms Nandy’s speech in Manchester can be found here.

Meanwhile, our big read this week comes from The Bristol Cable, which celebrates its 10th birthday this year, but has arguably found the last 12 months its most challenging following significant changes to its sources of funding.

Turning to membership to drive more revenue is a huge challenge, especially when research suggests only around one in 20 people would consider paying for local news, and then only in very small amounts. But what The Cable is achieving is remarkable. Thanks to Eliz Mizon for writing for us.

Thanks to you, too, for reading — let us know what you think of this week’s newsletter.

Behind Local News

Good news this week

• Reach journalists secured two of the big awards at last week’s Publisher Newsletter Awards. Newsletters have been big business at Reach since early 2019 — read more about that here, and well done to Rob Parsons of The Northern Agenda and Will Hayward of The Will Hayward Newsletter.
• A stunning wrap celebrating the Olympics awaited readers of the Impartial Reporter last week. Take a look — and see how it came about.
• A partnership between the Lancashire Post and Blog Preston has led to the creation of the Parched Pea podcast, which celebrates the characters of the Lancashire city.
• And good luck to the Great Central Gazette, a newsroom in Leicester, which has unveiled two new membership tiers aimed at organisations wishing to support local news.

Also on site this week:

They were already less local, now it turns out BBC Local radio is less ‘live’ too. What’s going on?

Having taken an axe to dozens of local radio shows around the UK, BBC bosses have decided to press on with plans which would end live local news bulletins on many stations too. We take a look why.

Ofcom to keep digging into the impact of the BBC’s expansion into local news online

The New Media Association has now urged the regulator, which last week published an interim update of its Local Media Review — while welcoming the body’s work on recognising the damaging impact big tech is having on local journalism

The local newsroom where print is more important than ever

In May, South Leeds Life marked its 10th anniversary. The publication started with 12, full colour tabloid pages, and now boasts a pagination double that — and prints 6,000 copies a month, distributed through around 200 pick up points, such as libraries, schools, shops, mosques and community centres.

How The Bristol Cable managed to get inches away from a £40k grant

For a decade, the Bristol Cable has set out to do local news differently — determined to create a membership model which keeps power in the hands of readers. Writing for Behind Local News, The Cable’s strategy lead, Eliz Mizon, shares how they’ve sought to overcome their most challenging 12 months to date:

This year our local media co-op, The Bristol Cable, is turning 10. We’ve survived a tumultuous decade against the odds by raising grant money and campaigning hard for membership income, one one primary message: our members, not press barons or shareholders, own the paper.

In 2023, we could see that the vast majority of grant money for truly independent journalism had dried up. So we launched an incredibly ambitious membership campaign, and our one remaining grant funder gave us quite the incentive to succeed: raise membership revenue by £60,000, a 50% increase, within a year.

At time of writing, we’re 82% of the way to that target, with one month left to go. To put this in perspective, we need just 100 more members to pay £120/year, and we’ll meet our target, and the campaign has just been nominated for an award. Here’s how we’ve done it.

We began the campaign at the end of September with a three-pronged strategy:

• Firstly we worked out that we could achieve the entire target simply by convincing every one of our existing 2,500 members to give £2 more per month across the year. We thought that might be a little ambitious, so we settled on a target of 25% of members making a £2 uplift, encouraged by direct email marketing.
• Secondly, to encourage new members at higher contribution levels, we embarked on a multimedia campaign and relaunched our membership benefit tiers. Previously, the only ‘soft’ benefit we offered was to send the quarterly magazine to members’ doors if they paid anything more than £3/month. We rearranged the tiers with a range of benefits at £5/month or more and £10/month.
• Thirdly, we added a tier for those people who can afford to pay a significant chunk more — £1,000/year or more — to pay it forward. Our new Patron membership, which preserves our democratic membership ethos (one member, one vote, no matter your contribution) means that people who can afford to pay more for our journalism can subsidise those who cannot.

By the end of 2023, with early momentum we had increased our income by a third: £20,000. We continued campaigning hard all through the first half of 2024 to get to our current 82% mark, almost £50,000 of the £60,000 target.

Last month, the Reuters Institute’s annual Digital News Report revealed only 9% of Brits pay for online news and around two thirds (69%) say they wouldn’t pay anything. The average Brit wants to pay between £2 — £5 for news, not a sustainable level for most local papers unless they have a huge base.

So we’re proud of what we’ve managed to achieve. The cost of living crisis has meant a significant amount of churn, so while our exact number of members has only increased slightly, our increase in income from new net memberships is currently £10,300.

More than 500 existing members have increased their contribution by an average of £3, and I have even spoken to members who have increased their contribution more than once during the year, as the campaign has progressed and they have been inspired by our success, with the total increase from members at £20,200.

And we’ve managed to attract 13 Patrons so far, contributing around £25,000. Famously, this is an unlucky number, and so I am making a strong appeal to you, dear reader — do you know our 14th Patron? Feel free to send them my way.

If we succeed, an extra £100,000 would mean one-to-two years more runway to continue building our membership, and develop further sustainable revenue streams now that our staff of ten is big enough to incorporate this. One more campaign like this, plus a couple more income streams, could see us able to break even for the first time.

If you’d like to help us get to the target, whether you’re Bristol-based or a supporter of our advocacy work for UK local journalism, find out more about the Cable’s annual membership and Patron membership.

Thanks for reading,

Behind Local News