Oliver Rouane-Williams, founder of Ipswich.co.uk, on breaking the status quo of local news

Oliver Rouane-Williams invested £160k last year to launch Ipswich.co.uk, an Axios-inspired take on local news in the UK.

His vision was to break away from the status quo of page view-driven advertising models that dominate the local news industry. Instead, he saw an opportunity to forge paid partnerships with local businesses to support positive, community journalism.

Journalism.co.uk checks in with founder Rouane-Williams eight months in to discuss his first (and unusual) hires, the development of his business model and whether he will stop doing 100-hour weeks anytime soon.

Responses have been edited for brevity.

Q: How is business so far?

It is going as well as I reasonably could have hoped.

We went from literally zero visitors in August 2024, to 55,000 visitors in our third month. And since then, we have maintained that. So we are in our eighth month currently.

January was our best month yet when we had 73,000 visitors to the site. But we have not had a month with less than 55,000 visitors after three months, so we cannot complain.

Q: Ipswich football club returned to the Premier League this season. Did that help?

Not at all - I considered leading with sport, but chose to lead with news and everything else instead. But we do very little on football. We get about 100 visits a week maybe on football. We have two guest writers, neither professional journalists, who go to games and write pieces. But no, we have not been able to piggyback on Ipswich football club's Premier League return.

Q: What does resonate with your readers, then?

We try to make sure that around 60 to 70 per cent of what we put out is positive content, and we break topics down into four areas.

One is challenging the public sector - we have done a lot around devolution of power. We recently had a heated exchange between the Suffolk County Council trying to take back control of library services and the charity that's run them for the last 12 years. 

The second is around strengthening civic pride. We try to champion people and organisations within the town, and challenge people's perceptions of Ipswich. So that's been a key focus.

Then there is what we call accelerating the private sector and amplifying the non-profit sector. So working with local businesses to grow our private sector and community impact. And we do a lot of stories around organisations that are tackling important local issues, like social mobility and unemployment, through to homelessness and poverty.

Q: What do readers think of your Axios-inspired writing style, with lots of bullet points and summaries?

It was a gamble that paid off. We have yet to have a single piece of negative feedback and we have had between 200 and 300 people write in to say how much they enjoy the structure of our reporting.

Ipswich.co.uk's Axios-inspired news format

I did not expect that four autistic people would write in to say they prefer how we logically break stories down to make them easy to read and understand. That is a great added bonus.

Our newsletter engagement is insanely high - our open rates are 63 per cent and steady since day one, across 2,700 subscribers - because people tell us they can go into our newsletter and get everything they need quickly.

Q: What about read depth and completion metrics?

The honest answer is we do not know, because we took a privacy-first stance on our analytics from day one, meaning we do not profile readers.

We only see the number of visitors, traffic sources, referring URLs, etc. We can see what pages they view, but all that data is anonymised. There are no IDs or cookies. It is enough to make informed decisions and gauge what people are reading and what they are interested in. Nothing more than that.

Q: Are local businesses helping fund your business?

We had a fairly steep learning curve in the first three months figuring out how to have these conversations with businesses who are used to doing sole advertising.

We have now got around 15 funding partners - paying on average £1500 a year - and the local business community has embraced what we are trying to and bought into our vision. We expect to be close to breaking even by the end of the year, and that is in line with our expectations. I would be happy to have broken even within 12 to 15 months, given what we have invested.

These relationships are super strong, but we are learning lessons all the time. I have learned there are two distinct camps of partners: those who want to step back and be hands-off, and those who want to be involved.

It was really easy to get businesses excited about the model. It was then a lot harder to getting cash in the bank and partnerships signed.

It takes typically three months to go through the onboarding process, sitting down with multiple stakeholder groups like external PR and marketing agencies.

Once we understand the aims of the business and the work they do within the community, we can plan coverage around them, but they can also send us press releases. This means they provide a really credible local expert source challenging local issues or incoming legislation.

Q: You have made your first three hires at Ipswich.co.uk. Two of those are quite unusual roles: a civic pride reporter (Amy Wragg) and a community impact reporter (Elouise Lavington). Tell us more about why you made these your first hires.

My view has always been that, in the last 10 years, global journalism has become really passive. It has settled for reporting stories without any real consideration of the impact that those stories have on the prosperity of the communities they represent. That has been a real bugbear for me. So I was adamant that the roles that we create at Ipswich.co.uk were active, not passive. As in, directly accountable for positive outcomes in the community.

Where we landed was civic pride and community impact reporters.

So civic pride, if you look at Ipswich as a town, it has become a victim of its own negativity. People are stuck in this horrible social media echo chamber and have convinced themselves that it is the single worst place to live in the entire world.

We wanted to hire Amy to champion the town. She celebrates its wins. She challenges internal and external perceptions. She represents the town for what it is. She embraces the grittier side and all the diverse communities that we have.

Elouise, as community impact reporter, shines a light on the organisations and people that tackle some of most important issues in our town and amplifies the positive impact they have within our community.

She works with non-profits, charities, community groups, faith leaders, community leaders - anyone who wants to be a part of the solution to the challenges that we face. And that is really broad. That includes poverty and homelessness, warm banks, food banks, churches and the role they play within the community, mental and physical health, social mobility, youth unemployment, offending and reoffending.

Q: What broader community need do you think these roles address or speak to?

Ipswich.co.uk is a news organisation, but it is more like a town regeneration project. Journalism is just one of the tools that we use to improve it. We inform, we educate, we entertain, but it is just one part. In the future, we want to become a direct part of that solution.

We want to support entrepreneurs and organisations. We want to work with our business improvement district to amplify the impact that they have for its levy-paying members and all the businesses that operate within the town centre. We want to challenge local authorities, local government and make sure that they are playing their part in solving some of these challenges.

The journalism side, news, the media, as a form, I am immensely passionate about it. But I've always had much broader aspirations for the role that we play in terms of the regeneration of Ipswich.

Q: Anita Li of The Green Line in Canada said that community journalism needs to do more than just supply the news. It needs to help people with their day-to-day life. Do you agree?

It is a really good point. If you go back 100 years, people were crying for more content. All they wanted was more access to more content. Fast forward now is the opposite. People are so sick of content. They want less talk, less content, less reporting. What they want to see is change. 

If your journalism is not resulting in change, to me it is meaningless. There is zero point in just ramming more content and more issues down people's throats, unless you are willing to actively do something about it.

Q: You have been writing for the website before these roles were filled. What is your record for stories filed in one day?

I have written 19 in one day but only published 13 of them. It was a long day. I typically work from 7 am to 3 am. I do that every single weekday and then I work at least one day every weekend. I set aside one weekend day for family time and then accept that I am only working the other. I go into every day knowing I need four stories banked and then I generally publish between seven and twelve stories a day. So it has been quite a full-on.

Q: Are you going to stop writing for the website anytime soon?

No, it feels a long way off. Elouise and Amy deliberately produce articles I would not have created anyway. I am still going to report on my beat. But it is nice knowing that we are going to be producing very well-written journalism on issues that otherwise would have been forgotten about.

Q: Why do you need to publish so much as a small team?

The biggest mistake - for lack of a better word - was that on our first day we published eight stories and every single issue of the newsletter had eight stories in. And people got a taste for it.

We started with aspirations of being like a weekly edition-based publication where every week we would publish between five and ten stories and we then started covering the daily news cycle and got stuck in the trap.

Producing eight daily stories is what has driven the growth and appetite for our website. People love the fact that they do not miss out on a lot of news by using us instead of our bigger competitors. But it is really hard to keep up.

Q: Is there a plan for you stopping 20-hour shifts?

I hope so. I am nearly 36, so I am certainly not getting any younger. There is only so long you can sustain that for. But ultimately it is just going to come down to revenue, right?

Hopefully, my hours as a reporter will decline as revenue increases and we can bring in more people. For now, I have accepted there will be no holiday until Christmas.

Oliver Rouane-Williams is speaking at Newsrewired on 13 May 2025 at News UK, London, on a panel about breaking the status quo of local journalism. Grab your ticket now

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