Also, a Netflix for local news is launching in Colorado, California, Georgia, and Kansas
This post first appeared 11 Sept. 2025
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs and small businesses find viable business models.
The Washington Post’s former managing editor, who criticized owner Jeff Bezos’s purging of “woke” opinion pieces, has turned up in an unlikely place — Manchester, England. His name is Cameron Barr, and we’ll get to him in a moment.
But first I want to highlight for you some of the innovations in local media that are transforming how people get trustworthy, relevant news and information. These publications are having an impact in their local communities, so you might not have heard about them from national media, which focus on New York, Washington, L.A., and — sometimes — Texas.
So, I hope you find this week’s post inspiring. You’re going to hear about:
- The steady expansion of an innovative local news chain in six U.K. cities
- How streaming of local TV news is launching in four states
- How a host of other local news initiatives are flying below your radar
Manchester: the BBC and The Mill Media
Manchester is dear to my heart from my time there working on the launch of a business newspaper. (Alas, it folded after three years). In more than a decade since, I have followed media industry developments there.
In the early 2000s, the BBC decided to decentralize and began moving much of its TV production northwest to Manchester, England’s second-largest city. Studio space was cheaper there and employees would enjoy a lower cost of living.
The project was called Media City, and I witnessed some of the first investment activity. The BBC now employs 3,200 people there in 26 departments.
In 2020 Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill Media in Manchester. He settled there during the pandemic, looked at the local media ecosystem and saw opportunity. “There is an enormous oversupply of non-journalistic food content — press releases from restaurants, cocktail bars, etc.,” he told me during an interview last year. “There’s also a lot of fairly undifferentiated low-quality journalism news content.” Police stuff mainly, he said.
“And there is a really stark undersupply of in-depth analysis of political issues. There’s an undersupply of cultural coverage. And there’s an undersupply of writing that takes writing seriously, that tries to inspire people rather than just entertain them. So I’m trying to provide people with a bunch of things that they couldn’t get anywhere else and that they will really love reading.”
In May, on the fifth anniversary of The Mill’s launch, Herrmann described how he got started with a mere 24 Substack followers. Since then, The Mill has attracted high profile investors — £350,000 (US $470,000) — and has 20 journalists at its local news editions — Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and London. Of the 169,000 readers, more than 10,000 are paying members. (See also the PressGazette’s coverage from 2024.)
And now, more investigative reporting. Herrmann has just named Cameron Barr the investigations editor for The Mill’s six publications. Barr’s teams won several Pulitzer prizes at the Washington Post. Herrmann told the PressGazette that the appointment “signals our ambition to become a leading centre of investigative journalism in the UK.”
A Netflix for local news?
Apologies for starting with the U.K., but the same forces at work there are being felt here in the U.S. The U.K., with its lower population and smaller land mass, has a far more concentrated and centralized media ecosystem than the U.S. The news tends to flow from the main media center, London.
And just as that media-center focus has created an opportunity for Joshi Herrmann and The Mill Media, the closure of thousands of local newspapers and broadcast outlets in the U.S. has opened the door for innovative solutions.
Which brings us to the The Local, which aims to reinvent local TV news, starting in four states — California, Colorado, Georgia, and Kansas. It leads its website with these words from legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite: “Without a free and independent press, there can be no democracy.”
A new business model. “The company is envisioning — eventually — a network of news bureaus in every state with an entirely new business model to support it,” Nieman Lab reported.
“The Local wants a break from the traditional format and conventions of local TV news. Those behind it believe they have a solution for the funding side that isn’t based solely on advertising but instead on content contracts with streaming platforms” (emphasis mine — JB).
What’s the problem?
The Local describes a worrisome media landscape: “Since 2005, over 3,200 local print newspapers have ceased to exist in the United States. Well-known and well-funded online news brands have failed, merged, or severely cut services.
“Local TV stations were purchased by conglomerates who cut reporting capacity to reduce costs and increase profits.” And it goes on. There are news deserts out there.
I heard an informal presentation about The Local last week from Carol Wood, an expert on sustainable media models and senior VP of the company. The Local has big ambitions, she said, and is seeking millions in investment to build out a national network.
Wood declined to give specifics on initial financing but said The Local is funding her efforts to hire and train staff for the first four newsrooms. She posted on her LinkedIn page, “We’re seeking talented journalists, editors, producers, and videographers who are passionate about reshaping how local communities get their news. We’ll also contract with existing local newsrooms for their work. . . . Let’s build something powerful, together.”
Final thought
I’m a mentor to small businesses and spent most of my career writing about them. Starting a business is hard, and starting a business in hard times is even harder. But it’s actually times of economic and social turmoil that allow innovators to emerge. They don’t know what they don’t know.
They can take advantage of the fact that established businesses like to stick with the formulas that always worked for them in the past. As conditions change in the economy, they cling to the old ways. They’re either too lazy, uninspired, or risk-averse to try something new. They slowly decline, like a patient with incurable cancer.
Meanwhile, small business entrepreneurs, either through ignorance or insight, try new models that look silly or unworkable to established businesses. These entrepreneurs are confident that, despite what everyone tells them, they have a great idea that can’t possibly fail. And they will work hard to make it work.
Sadly, most fail. And some of those folks take what they learned to try again. They’re cockeyed optimists, geniuses ahead of their time, or just plain stubborn.
And actually, that’s what venture capitalists bet on. They’ll invest in 10 projects knowing that nine will fail. But the 10th — oh, the 10th! — it might make up for the losses of the other nine, and then some.
Afterthought
Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, has just published a study of the current news media ecosystem in the U.S. Amaris Castillo provides a summary for the Poynter Institute.
Downie acknowledges the disastrous decline in news outlets and quality journalism, but he also points to a number of successes, among them the Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, The Texas Tribune, VTDigger in Vermont, and WyoFile in Wyoming.
He singled out the success of the Baltimore Banner, which is one of the few behind a hard paywall, and has managed to attract 65,000 subscribers. The Banner won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for a series on Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis.
Castillo added, “Downie also shone a light on national nonprofits that provide local news coverage of specialized subjects such as education, climate and health. As examples he mentioned ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting newsroom that partners with dozens of both nonprofit and for-profit local news outlets on investigative reporting projects through its Local Reporting Network, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Inside Climate News — a nonprofit specializing in reporting about the climate and the environment.”
So, in spite of the crisis, creative solutions are emerging. Thought you would like to know.