Newsroom vindicated after Arts Council finds its funding investigation claims were correct

A newsroom which called on its readers to rally round with a ‘community fact check’ after being threatened with legal action over an investigation appears to have been vindicated after a Government body backed its allegations up.

Last year, the Manchester Mill newsletter published allegations that a company run by an advisor to mayor Andy Burnham had made inaccurate claims in a submission for Covid funding from the Arts Council during the pandemic.

Primary Events Solutions was given £400,000. The Mill’s investigations centred on whether the company have over-stated its role in Greater Manchester’s cultural economy when, at the time, it was primarily a security firm.

After publishing the article, the company’s boss, Sacha Lord, who has now stepped down as Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s night time economy tsar, threatened to sue The Mill.

That prompted Mill founder Joshi Herrmann to appeal to readers to help review all the documents it had on the application to the Arts Council. Readers flocked to help the newsletter’s work.

The Arts Council subsequently started its own investigation, and last week concluded that the application was ‘wrong or misleading.’ It will will now seek to claw the money back.

Reporter Jack Dulhanty, who authored the original investigation, wrote in an email to Mill subscribers this weekend: “Within days of the first story going out, Lord was threatening to sue us “in vindication of his good name”. It became clear then that this wasn’t something I could continue reporting on my own.

“We called upon our readers, in a big “community fact check” to read through the application and find more evidence of Lord’s company making misleading statements. The Mill Media team, across all of our titles in Sheffield, Liverpool, and Birmingham, began poring over the application. My colleague Mollie and I, along with student journalists Molly Wilkinson and Jacob Hartley, began to piece together the tips coming in from readers and our other papers, and used it to publish more stories that backed up the original reporting.

“For months after, my editor Joshi and I would have passing conversations about what we thought they would find. If they cleared Lord of wrongdoing, he could potentially restart legal proceedings — a difficult thing to have hanging over you for the better part of a year.

“We always felt that this story mattered because our readers had a right to expect that the public authorities involved — the Arts Council and the GMCA — should be transparent and honest about mistakes that had been made. If serious allegations about the use of public money were made against a powerful figure who was appointed by an elected mayor, the authorities involved should tell us straight whether they accepted or rejected those claims. Our job was, as it often is, to force them to account to the public.

“Remaining focussed on a single subject for months on end would not be possible without the support of our members. As a journalist in my twenties, most media companies would never have given me the time to work on the original profile piece that set this whole chain of events off, let alone allowed me to pursue follow-up stories when tipsters got in touch afterwards. So many journalists these days are asked to write several stories in a day, robbing them of the opportunity to follow leads and dig deep into things that matter.”

The Mill is now focusing on the actions of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and why it didn’t act sooner.