UK Publisher Mill Media Grows & Profits Amid Shrinking Local News Market

By: Kari McMahon

The UK’s still a fairly crowded market for news, even as readership declines and newsrooms shutter. Those factors make four-year-old local news publisher Mill Media—at least partly profitable with six digital news sites and with an estimated annual revenue of $1.5 million—a startling accomplishment.

Mill Media’s first title, founded in Manchester in 2020 and known as The Mill, makes money, and The Tribune in Sheffield started profiting within 18 months of its 2021 launch. As a whole, the company broke even in 2023. Over the last few months, they launched The Londonerand Glasgow’s The Bell.

The number of journalists covering regional news in the UK totaled 3,000 in 2022, down from 9,000 in 2007, the Press Gazette reported earlier this year. A similar decline can be seen with advertising revenue: UK news media represented 6% of the total national advertising spend in 2022, compared to 39% in 2007.

A dramatic fall in the quality of local journalism across the UK is one of the key reasons why founder Joshi Herrmann felt confident that Mill Media could work, especially with large corporate media entities controlling the majority of the industry in the country, and with a focus on clicks versus quality.

“It just seemed like if you could get reader revenue going from readers who appreciated well-written journalism, then there’d be a really clear path to building a business around that,” Herrmann told AMO. The advent of paid email newsletters has been a great help. “Suddenly there was a model for funding independent local news in the way there wasn’t before.”

Quality Over Quantity

It’s a rare occurrence to even hear the word “profitability” uttered in the same sentence as “local news.”

About 92% of revenue comes from subscriptions, while advertising is 7% and the remaining 1% comes from miscellaneous revenue sources. Mill Media’s website, which doesn’t yet mention the new publications, lists the company as having 100,000 subscribers and over 8,000 paying subscribers. Herrmann is hoping to end the year with 150,000 people on Mill Media’s free mailing list and 9,000 paying subscribers.

“I’d be more comfortable if subscriptions were still the majority [of revenues] like 60%, 65% or 70%,” Herrmann, a former Evening Standard staffer, said. “[92%] feels too high, I think relying so hard on one type of revenue feels a bit dangerous and I prefer a 65% split on subscriptions and 30%, or 25%, on ads and then the remainder being from events and consulting,” such as providing editorial guidance to other publications.

Mill Media’s mission is to lead “a renaissance in high-quality journalism across the UK.” The startup’s reporters do deep hyperlocal reporting and produce long reads and investigations, which typically take weeks, or even months, to come together. Only a few pieces of journalism will hit its sites each week.

Its first story for new site The Londoner was an exposé on UK Labour MP Jas Athwal, published on the day of the launch, caught the attention of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer just hours after going to press. Not a bad start for a brand-new publication.

“It was good timing … it wasn’t a hugely strategic plan, it just sort of worked out that way,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of Mill Media. A few weeks prior, Mill Media had launched another publication, The Bell, in Glasgow using its tried and tested method of introducing the brand and explaining the rationale for launching in that city.

“I feel that it’s always good to test different approaches, so I don’t just do one thing in every single city that we operate … [we] almost use the fact that we have more than one publication to learn faster and iterate faster,” Herrmann said.

Sustainable Growth

Following the expansion to London and Glasgow, the goal is to get the company back to sustainability, Herrmann said. Over the next year, he has “high aspirations” for London, setting “higher targets” for the city in terms of pace of growth because it is much bigger than the other cities Mill Media operates in.

Growth is the north star that guides Herrmann towards sustainability.

“I’m just very aware of the fact that the better the journalism gets, the more growth you get,” Herrmann said. “And if you have a period where you’re struggling for growth, it’s generally because your journalism isn’t as good as it was before.”

Earlier this year, The Mill added 272 new paid subscribers after publishing an explosive investigation into local Manchester businessman Sacha Lord, alleging that Lord’s company Primary Events Solutions applied for and received £401,928 from the Arts Council’s pandemic recovery fund despite having no history of staging artistic events.

“You generally feel like when you’re publishing really amazing stuff you grow really fast and if you’re publishing stuff that’s not quite grabbing people you flatline,” Herrmann said. “There’s a pleasing correlation between journalistic quality and subs growth.”

Mill Media tries to retain about 75% of its subscribers over the course of a year because that translates to a strong net growth rate. Retention strategies focus on making readers feel part of the community through comments, emails and a conversational tone, Herrmann said. Day-to-day, Herrmann and his team obsess over net subs growth, which is the measure of how many subs each city has and how many subs they had 30 days ago.

Running the Numbers

While journalists’ work is the key driver for growth, they are not measured individually on subscription growth. Journalist salaries represent more than half of the company’s costs. In September, Mill Media announced it will be moving its publications from Substack to Ghost as a way to cut costs.

“It’ll be really significant savings when we move over,” Herrmann said. Substack takes 10% of all subscription revenue compared to Ghost, which carries a SaaS fee, which considering the size of its subscription business, brings six figures in savings.

The expansion of The Londoner and The Bell was funded with around £350,000 raised from media executives, including CNN chief Mark Thompson and Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of Axios.

“The pitch was really just to say that I think what we’re doing is working,” Herrmann said. “We just really want this. There is a more positive outlook for local journalism if it’s in this particular way.”

The fundraising has a “slightly different vibe” to media companies that have raised millions from large VC funds, Herrmann said, as this simply allows him to lean on “high quality people,” who know a lot about subscriptions and the media business.

“I feel a lot of pressure for us to work out and to do the journalism to get good growth, but that pressure really comes from me and the team,” Herrmann said. “I treat the investors more as people who can advise when we’ve got a strategic question or something. Having investors hasn’t increased the pressure from my perspective.”

Herrmann isn’t opposed to raising more money to pay for further expansion, but an “enormous fundraise” is not on the cards for 2025. The priority, instead, is to produce “amazing journalism” and “get good financial growth” for the current portfolio, he said.

“We’ve got a good model, we’ve got a good team, and we’re getting some good growth,” Herrmann said. “We’ve shown it can be sustainable as a company last year. We’ve shown that a couple of our first cities, in Sheffield [and] Manchester, are profitable now. It shouldn’t be a company that needs enormous outside investment.”

“I feel more like we’ve got a real challenge to do an amazing job in these six places and we’ll try our best to do it,” Herrmann said. “If there’s a seventh next year that would be cool, but it’s not the priority right now.”