The Mill is Greater Manchester’s quality newspaper, delivered via email
Join the 50,000 readers on our free mailing list to get fascinating local stories and great recommendations in your email inbox every week.
Run from our office just off St Ann’s Square, The Mill is for people who want local news without endless pop-up ads or misleading “clickbait” headlines. We produce the kind of local journalism that is both informative and enjoyable to read — including investigative long reads, absorbing culture pieces and opinionated columns about the biggest local talking points.
We believe in the power of proper reporting and good writing rather than chasing clicks, and we particularly focus on giving our readers the context they need to understand what’s really going on. We know people are inundated with information so we purposely focus on offering quality rather than quantity. Join our list now.
“I’m backing Mill Media because of the exceptional quality of its journalism and because it’s such an interesting and encouraging initiative. Britain’s cities need great commercially-sustainable journalism to inform the public and hold powerful institutions to account.” — Mark Thompson, CNN chief executive and former CEO of the New York Times
“I love the ambition of bringing deeply-reported narrative journalism to local news and I’m so impressed with how it’s going. That’s the kind of journalism Britain needs more of. If I was a young writer right now, I would want to work for Mill Media.” — Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.
“A great read. Subscribe, fellow Mancunians.” — Michael Rawlinson KC, longtime Mill member
How it works
Some of our journalism is free. Just sign up to our mailing list below and you will get one original story from us every week, plus our Monday news briefing which rounds up the most important stories in Greater Manchester and recommends great things to do.
Mill members get everything we publish. They pay £8.90 a month (or just £1.71 a week if they subscribe for a year) and receive our stories in their inboxes four days a week. Members also join our discussion threads, contribute to our reporting and support our growth as we build a new home for high-quality journalism in Greater Manchester.
Click the button below to join our free mailing list or become a paying member.
Corporate subs: If you would like to buy a set of subscriptions for your team at work, click here for a 25% group discount. It’s a great way to allow your colleagues to become more connected to the city they live and work in.
Advertise: If your company or organisation wants to partner with us and reach our 50,000 highly engaged readers across Greater Manchester, please email daniel@millmediaco.uk or visit our ads page.
The people behind The Mill
The Mill was launched during the Covid-19 lockdown by me, Joshi Herrmann, to give Greater Manchester a different kind of news coverage. I have worked as a journalist for a decade, including reporting for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Evening Standard. Now we have a team of three staff journalists in the office and a brilliant network of freelance contributors, including some of the best writers in the North. You can read some of my Mill stories here, including my long read about the tensions between the residents of New Islington and the old Ancoats.
Our senior editor is Sophie Atkinson, who is both a brilliant writer (read her strange and eery piece about Burnage Garden Village) and a fantastic editor, who comes up with many of our ideas and does lots of the work to improve our stories before they go out. Sophie often writes our biggest cultural pieces, like her examination of the new Aviva Studios when it opened, but she also writes beautiful features, like her piece about hunting for Salford’s lost “secret garden”. Sophie also writes cultural stories for some of the biggest publications on earth (even bigger than The Mill), including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Mollie Simpson is one of our two staff writers. Mollie was one of the first ever freelance writers for The Mill when she was still a student at the University of Manchester in 2020, filing dramatic tales from inside the campus during the pandemic. She joined us on staff in July 2021 and has since become known for her scoopy reporting style which often turns up new details that no one has reported before, like her rare interview with the elusive and powerful Peel Group or her scoop about a Saudi property developer and a burned-down pub. Her investigation into a spiking in the Northern Quarter was praised in parliament in a debate about sexual violence.
Our other staff writer is Jack Dulhanty, who grew up in Salford and joined us after finishing his journalism course in January 2022. Jack is best known for his investigative long reads and profiles that dig deep into a company or person, and since he joined the company he’s become the leading chronicler of what goes on inside Manchester’s hospitality industry. His long read about the Michelin-star restaurant Mana was a huge hit, as was his piece about Mark Garner, the founder of Manchester Confidentials. In 2023, he wrote a penetrating two-part profile of the nightlife impresario Sacha Lord.
“It’s already better than any local newspaper in Britain.” — Will Lloyd, Unherd
“You give us thoughtful in depth articles, beautifully illustrated, and as well as covering places and people I might never have heard of, you unpack political battles without ever coming down on one side or another. Kudos!” Liz, Mill member
“This is brilliant! If you miss real, well-researched journalism without sensationalism and all the clickbait, have a read.” — Paula, Mill reader
📻 Listen to our free podcast: The Manchester Weekly from The Mill, which rounds up the stories you need to know about every Thursday, and brings you an in-depth story or interesting interview every Sunday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favoured podcast platform.
The story behind The Mill
The Mill started as a one-man band — with Joshi sending his first newsletter to just 23 email recipients in June 2020. Now we’ve got more than 50,000 readers, more than 3,000 paying subscribers, and we’ve created a wider company called Mill Media that publishes sister publications in Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham.
The Mill is our attempt to find a new business model for local news. Local journalism has been devastated in recent years, with thousands of reporters laid off and newsrooms badly depleted. We hope this project can be part of the fightback. (Read Joshi’s piece about what’s gone wrong in local news).
The Mill is funded by its readers via a paid membership program. For the price of a couple of pints per month, paying members receive original reporting from us daily rather than weekly. They also join our community, including being part of our members’ discussion group and being invited to our meetups (once that is allowed again). The Mill’s members are supporting the growth of a new type of journalism in Greater Manchester, allowing us to take on more reporting and hire local journalists.
Get in touch
If you have a story that you think we should know about, please do get in touch by emailing editor@manchestermill.co.uk. If your story is sensitive, we will handle it with care. We are very used to dealing with confidential sources, and will never reveal the identity of contact unless they explicitly agree to their name appearing.
If you have a complaint about something we have published, please follow our complaints procedure.
Write for The Mill
We are always on the lookout for great journalists, whether they are in the first year of their career or the 50th year. Our best pieces have been written both by people who have bylines in the New York Times and The Guardian, and writers who are still studying.
We value compelling writing, good scoops and writers who like wandering around neighbourhoods to find out what’s really going on in peoples’ lives. If you would like to write for The Mill, please read our pitching guide.
