The Mill is Greater Manchester’s new quality newspaper - delivered by email
Join the 13,000+ readers on our mailing list to get useful local information and thoughtful journalism in your inbox every week — it’s completely free.
Founded in June 2020, The Mill is for people who want a new kind of local news and don’t have the patience for pop-up ads and endless scrolling on social media. Our newsletters recommend local events, keep you up to date on what’s happening in Greater Manchester and investigate important stories in politics, education, business and culture.
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.
How it works
The Mill Weekly 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.
The Mill Daily is for Mill members, who pay £7-a-month and get our stories in their inboxes 5 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. All our work is funded by our members, so we hope you will consider joining when the time is right for you.
Click the button below to join our free mailing list or become a paying member of The Mill
“A great read. Subscribe, fellow Mancunians.” — Michael Rawlinson QC, Mill member
“The Mill is a great idea. Just the kind of local journalism I want to read - intelligent, trustworthy and insightful.” — Jon Connell, founder of The Week magazine
“This is brilliant! If you miss real, well-researched journalism without sensationalism and all the clickbait, have a read.” — Paula Wallen, Mill reader
The story behind The Mill
The Mill was launched during the 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 (you can find a few of my stories here).
The Mill is my attempt to find a new business model for local news. Local journalism has been devastated in recent years, with thousands of journalists laid off and newsrooms badly depleted. I hope this project can be part of the fightback. (Read my 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.
Please join them as founding members by clicking the button below.
Read some of our stories
You can find our first stories on our homepage here, and here are some good ones to read:
A gripping feature about “idealism, secrets and paranoia” in Burnage Garden Village.
A feature about the life of James Watkins, a fugitive slave who came to Bolton and Manchester in the 1850s.
An interview with a food delivery rider about his extraordinary journey to Manchester from Sudan.
And in-depth pieces about how Manchester property is sold to overseas investors, the way Miles Platting is changing and a ‘neighbourhood war’ over ridding streets of cars.
Members-only stories:
A crime piece from the crown courts about the “very peculiar case” of a Manchester man convicted of texting underage girls.
Didsbury, Sale, Worsley? A model predicts the winners and losers from the move to remote work
Palazzo Manchester: We dig through the archives to explain why Manchester has so many Italian-looking buildings.
Our interview with Sir Richard Leese about why Greater Manchester is trying to finally dismantle Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of buses.
You can follow The Mill on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Instagram.
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. It could be something that needs to be investigated, but it could also be an amazing human story about someone in Greater Manchester whose life deserves more attention.
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 want to use an encrypted email, we have a Protonmail address: milleditor@protonmail.com.
How can I help The Mill?
The Mill is funded by subscription revenue from our members. The more we get, the faster we can become sustainable and start to grow our team. If you are interested in joining us as a member, just click here.
If you like the idea of what we are doing, please tell your friends and forward them the link to this page, so they can sign themselves up, or use the button below
Write for The Mill
The Mill has a network of brilliant freelance contributors, including some of the best writers in the North. We are constantly 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 forgotten neighbourhoods and hanging out in old boozers 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. It tells you everything you need to know about how to pitch and what we are looking for.
If you have other ideas or skills you would like to contribute to help us grow, please email joshi@manchestermill.co.uk. And we are always looking for people who have email lists in Greater Manchester and who are willing to tell their lists about us to spread the word. If that’s you, please get in touch.
