10 new and interesting media launches on our radar

What a time to be a journalist. A career does not need to be limited to the traditional route of working at an established news organisation. Many journalists are now getting entrepreneurial and starting up their own media ventures on their own backs. Or looking at challenges facing the industry and taking matters into their own hands.

A snap start to 2025 for Substack newsletters

The Melbourne Snap and The Gloucester Start are two new Substack newsletters with a focus on curating other local news stories, launched by journalists Sam Sheddon and Tom Gibbon, respectively.

They will both take inspiration from Michael MacLeod's Minute newsletters in Edinburgh and London, who has proved the concept for these curated newsletters and has offered to help anyone wanting to expand on his formula. MacLeod no longer says how many paid members he has, but it is more than 1,000, he confirmed to Journalism.co.uk.

The Snap and The Start closely follow the Minute model by offering a free round-up of local stories sent out on weekday early mornings, scouring and sourcing to local news websites and community groups. You can expect some top headlines, a glance at the weather and a handful of events to put in the diary. Both offer premium plans for subscribers to get commenting privileges and to support the titles.

The creators will be especially buoyed by what MacLeod said next: "Between the Edinburgh and London Minute, I now earn a salary and have started saving to buy a house, which always seemed like an impossible dream as a generation-rent journalist before. I never thought this would happen and don’t take it for granted. Even better than the salary is the feedback and connection with people. It’s the best job I’ve ever had."

Poking the Beehiiv

Another Scottish daily briefing comes from industry veteran Neil McIntosh, formerly editor of The Scotsman, managing editor of BBC and deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's European team.

McIntosh's new venture is The Early Line, launched at the start of 2025 on the rival newsletter platform Beehiiv. Writing on his LinkedIn, he shared promising early metrics, surpassing 1,000 free subscribers in three days, with an initial open rate of 72 per cent and a clickthrough rate of 20 per cent. Churn is currently at 0.5 per cent.

And this was a fascinating reflection: "What I'll label "Creator Cringe" is real. Moving from leading a big newsroom to working solo is a psychological shift. The hustling doesn’t come naturally to me, and more than a few journalists have mentioned encountering this mental barrier (are we trained out of it? Am I just the wrong generation? Or is it just alien to our culture?) But overcoming it is essential."

Value > volume

Don't fancy Substack or Beehiiv? One sports journalist decided to create his own publishing platform, CounterPress, and the concept news website, The Moonraker which covers his local sports team Swindon Football Club.

For the last six months, The Moonraker has amassed 530 paid members, currently paying £50 a year or £5 a month, and about two thirds pay monthly with a 93 per cent retention rate.

Most of those came through a pre-launch offer on that membership (£37.50 a year or £3 a month for the first 3 months). That member base has converted about 70 per cent of those who registered an interest in the publication in the market research phase.

Founder Sam Morshead said this has paid him an annual salary of £28k pro rata for the last six months, for just two days of work a week. Speaking on the Journalism.co.uk podcast, he said he is now looking to adopt more individual writers to launch their own sites to cover local patches up and down the UK. But not necessarily restricted to sports.

CounterPress provides all the essentials to get started: the basic CMS, newsletter features akin to Substack but with more media branding and customisation, all the accounts and analytics dashboards, and to develop further in the future, legal support.

"When you can curate smaller audiences with smaller overheads, you can make reasonable money and provide a service that is of value to the people who need the service," says Morshead.

"In a lot of cases where publishers have focused more on volume, they're losing track of what local media is meant to be - and that's the communities they're meant to serve."

Introducing the 'payeewall'

A tech journalism publication called Machine launched in late 2024 with a hot take on the paywall: pay the audience instead of asking them to pay.

It is co-operatively owned, meaning it will share profits with members. Founder Jasper Hamill said this could be around 10 per cent of total profits, speaking on the Journalism.co.uk podcast about his three-step business plan.

He plans to grow the media business, earning revenue from marketing services, PR, copyrighting and non-invasive ads, with a free subscription, using the Ghost platform. Then, after reaching 500 subscribers, a paid membership can be initiated with plans to accept a limited number of co-op members (to be confirmed) who would receive a profit share at least equal to the membership fee. This community informs the future expansion of the writer pool and business development plans.

"Primarily, it's about giving people a stake and a reason to care about the success of a publication," says Hamill.

Long-running co-operative media business The Bristol Cable enjoyed a lot of success last year in membership campaigns.

New app-first news publication for young readers

US-based Stringer is a new outlet for English-speaking Gen Z readers, born out of dissatisfaction with mainstream news providers. Its co-founder David Rodin says he was fed up with news being too slow to report the latest events and seeing social media beat journalists every time breaking news happens.

Interestingly, the outlet launched primarily as an app with a website that is more of a shopping window. Ran by four students and Rodin's dad, it has a pretty unorthodox structure: the creators are two LA-based techies, the editor is an MA student and there's no journalist on the payroll.

The outlet says it sources stories from freelancers on the ground and wows to pay all contributors. The business model is a bit of a mystery though: no subscriptions, no ads, no selling data to third parties, and no donations. Not sure how this one will pan out but we wish them luck.

Helping freelancers get fair pay

UK freelance journalists are facing a crisis, earning less than the national living wage while their work is being used online without payment. This challenging situation particularly affects journalists from diverse backgrounds, making it nearly impossible to build sustainable careers in journalism. In response, a new initiative called SCOOP aims to develop fair agreements between freelance journalists and technology companies to ensure creators receive proper payment when their work is used for things like news scraping or AI training.

SCOOP will serve as a straightforward solution, offering both payment distribution and rights management, while also supporting initiatives to develop new journalistic talent, especially from underrepresented communities. The project has gained significant support from key figures, including MP Caroline Dinenage and Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), who views it as a practical way to address the exploitation of freelancers.

The timing of SCOOP is crucial, as the journalism industry faces unprecedented challenges. In 2023, the UK saw 2,681 journalism jobs disappear - a 48 per cent increase from the previous year. Research shows that only 19 per cent of journalists come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and a striking 93 per cent have never received money from existing licensing agreements.

The initiative has received backing from both the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the Communications and Digital Committee, who have highlighted the need for fair licensing systems between journalists and AI platforms.

New recruitment agency dedicated to ex-journalists

Speaking of job loss and fair pay, a new recruitment agency Headline Search specialises in the recruitment of ex-journalists whose skills are prized in other industries. Founder Cathal Morrow says: "Journalism is on its knees, so I set up Headline Search to find cracking jobs for journalists and cracking journalists for jobs." We don't agree with that first bit but if you are looking for jobs outside of the media industry, check this out.

A hub for AI tools to make your work easier

And just so you are not disappointed by too few mentions of AI, a news-focused AI startup Otherweb has launched Press Hub, a suite of tools designed specifically for journalists. The platform aims to help journalists handle routine tasks such as creating URL slugs, social media posts and metadata.

It offers both free and paid versions, with the latter featuring advanced capabilities including a fact checker that validates claims against credible sources, a counterpoint generator for testing arguments, and a first-draft synthesiser that creates original articles based on current news.

Press Hub runs on a proprietary large language model, which has been trained to write like a professional journalist, avoiding the verbose language often associated with general-purpose AI tools. The platform prioritises user security through Clerk authentication standards and maintains strict data privacy, ensuring that user-generated content remains under complete user control and is not used to retrain AI models.

As a public benefit corporation, Otherweb serves more than 16 million active readers across various platforms and remains committed to transparency by publishing its models and datasets in a source-available format. As with any tools, always check the result and never, ever take anything at face value.

Credit where credit is due

News industry veterans Alan Hunter, Michael Brunt and Ivan Massow have launched Tomorrow's Publisher, an online news website that publishes articles on the publishing industry.

The launch was met with a lot of praise for its innovation, but it also drew scepticism from publishers like ourselves, Media Voices, Journo Resources and Press Gazette who were concerned about the use of AI to scrape an rewrite original news content.

Critics pointed out that an interview media consultant Lucy Kueng gave to La Nacion, bore similarity to the one on the website without proper credit. Articles since have backlinked to the original source, like an interview the LadBible CEO gave to Digiday.

Amongst a packed comment section on LinkedIn, Hunter confirmed: "We will address all the issues you raise soon in an article. But very briefly: the current content is sourced by NoahWire from its network of feeds and blogs; a draft is written by AI; then edited by a human, ensuring sources are credited (thus semi-automating a standard operating practice in journalism). Are there glitches in these early days? For sure. But we are working through them. We will add comment pieces very soon."

The website describes NoahWire as "using real-time algorithms and then rigorously verified against ten independent sources. We never copy content because trust and integrity in content is vital." It currently has 405 bylines at the time of writing two weeks after launch.

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