Tips and advice for getting started with Substack for local news

One of the leading lights in UK local news over the past few years is Mill Media. The newsletter-first startup launched in 2020 on the subscription platform Substack covering Manchester, with a vision for quality-first local reporting.

"I had this feeling for a while that you could do a small-scale subscription-funded media company if you focused on quality with a really small team, and you tried to differentiate hard from what was out there already," founder Joshi Hermann told Journalism.co.uk in 2022.

Its audience growth, Substack local news grants and investment from news veterans helped the model expand into other UK metropolitan hotspots; Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. Its model has inspired other similar, entrepreneurial efforts within UK local news.

There are trade-offs when working on Substack, though. Publishers part with 10 per cent of subscription revenue, in exchange for removing a tech burden. Hermann has always insisted that it was worth it starting out, plus he always had the assurance that he could export the mailing list because The Mill owns it.

And so he did. Mill Media recently departed Substack for newsletter rival Ghost, which charges a flat fee instead of a percentage of revenue. Hermann said that makes more economic sense in the next phase of the publication's growth. And there are other examples of newsletter creators making similar moves.

• Read more: Why Casey Newton's Platformer left Substack

Substack is a great option for those experimenting with local news, without it having to be a long-term fix.

This is put best by media consultant Isabelle Roughol on her LinkedIn: "The same features that make Substack amazing when you start (no upfront costs, basic template, network effects) make it super limiting when you grow (expensive cut of revenue, no site customisation, zero brand differentiation). I continue to recommend Substack to people starting out with zero capital or just testing the waters, especially if they never intend to charge and build a business."

But if you are considering a Substack newsletter for yourself - especially within local news - a Substack masterclass webinar this week (23 September) offered firsthand tips and advice from current innovators in this space.

Pursue value, not scale

Will Hayward is an investigative journalist, who wrote a politics newsletter for Reach plc title Wales Online, to explain and demystify Welsh politics. The Will Hayward Newsletter grew to 2k free subscribers within 10 months, and this week he decided to go on his Substack newsletter full-time. Will's tips include:

• Do one thing well: understand your key value proposition and deliver it well, always
• In this case, it is breaking exclusives on the platform and showing how the story happened. What is not yet confirmed? This builds trust and confidence with readers
• Look for inspiration beyond local news. Follow lots of other newsletters to stay on top of clever writing, formatting and content techniques
• Reactions, analysis and interpretation of key events work great for newsletters. Especially the case of political and election reporting
• Accept that you are just one person. Use themes (like spending cuts) to tell bigger stories. You probably will not be able to take on the rich and powerful alone, either.
• Embed paywalls halfway into the article, so web readers have an article to sample first.
• Do not fall into the trap of going for traditional news stories with "broad but shallow" appeal. In other words, stories that are well-read but have little retention. Keeping people hooked for longer than a minute produces habits and converts them into regular readers.

Grow slow

Michael MacLeod runs two Substack newsletters, The Edinburgh Minute (14k free subscribers) and The London Minute (2k free subscribers), curating all the best local news in the area in one helpful digest. They arrive in the inboxes every day at 7 am. Both are free with an option for readers to pay to support the titles.

• Keep the format simple: text, bullet points and links will suffice for a newsletter. Make new changes slowly and do not try to fix what is not broken
• Platforms like Reddit can get big spikes of subscribers based on recommendations
• Use a Google Form for reader tips and story submission. This stocks up the community notice board and encourages readers to forward newsletters on
• Think about subscriber benefits, but do not obsess about it: 80 per cent of paid subscribers do so simply to support the title, the other 20 per cent do so for the perks
• The leadership board offers readers a good incentive to spread the word. It has brought in lots of gifting and group subscriptions.
• Substack offers a wealth of metrics and data, but remain focused on your own values and definition of success. For Edinburgh Minute, this is its 500k referrals to external news websites since launch
• Use Substack pledges for an indication of how many readers would be prepared to become subscribers. This is also a nice vote of confidence in your work
• Use Substack recommendations to promote other newsletters, which hopefully, will then promote you back. This is a powerful network effect and a good growth hack
• Develop healthy and direct relationships with other news publications. Ask them to give advance notice on big stories coming out that are worth amplifying

Are newsletters a remedy for local news hang-ups?

The reason why newsletter providers have been so influential within UK local news might have something to do with the issues facing the sector, reasons Jonathan Heawood, executive director of Public Interest News Foundation (PINF).

Its annual PINF Index, a study into the UK independent news sector, revealed that 4.7m Britons live in news deserts (defined as areas without dedicated local news coverage).

The UK also battles a lot of broader problems as outlined in this year's Reuters Institute Digital News Report: low levels of trust towards the media (36 per cent), high levels of news fatigue (38 per cent) and low willingness to pay for news (eight per cent).

"It's fair to say Britain is not in love with the news media," says Heawood, suggesting that newsletters address many of these pain points by showcasing personalities, with its format and mode of delivery, and there is usually at least some level of free content available to consume.

A common complaint against traditional local news organisations is they have become "broad but shallow", not properly representing the communities they serve. Newsletters - especially those run by independent organisations and journalists - by contrast, are "deep but narrow", offering local expertise, voices and, as a result, more immediate value.

The PINF study also finds that 71 per cent of independent news organisations publish a newsletter, which correlates slightly with increased levels of revenue generated. That being said, just two per cent of total revenue across the whole sector comes from newsletters.

"Having a newsletter is a good part of a revenue mix for an independent news organisation," he says. "It's a small but growing part of the sector."

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