I used to read The Mill at school. Now I’m joining the team

Dear Millers — we have some very exciting news. After receiving more than 150 applications and interviewing dozens of candidates, we’ve chosen our new Mill staff writer: Lucy McLaughlin.

The vacancy was created by Mollie moving to Sheffield to bolster the team at our sister publication The Tribune. Given Mollie’s stellar record — including an investigation this year that prompted a major fraud investigation by Greater Manchester Police — we knew we needed someone brilliant.

Lucy joining is a great moment in many ways, not least because she’s from the first generation of Mancunians who read The Mill at school. She has wanted to work here ever since. She did excellent student journalism at Leeds University, and she graduated this summer.

We asked her to introduce herself below — we hope you will welcome her to The Mill in the comments.

Before that: we’re getting a lot of emails about yesterday’s story: Jack’s major scoop revealing the existence of a confidential report detailing “sleazy” behaviour by senior executives at Manchester City Council towards young female staff. Click below to read it and we will try to provide updates in the days to come.

Exclusive: Senior council officials engaged in ‘sleazy’ behaviour towards young female staff

Confidential report tells how an awards ceremony descended into bar-hopping and sexual misconduct

The MillJack Dulhanty

By Lucy McLaughlin

I was sitting at my kitchen table in south Manchester during lockdown, bored to tears, when my mum told me about this new media startup in our city, pushing back against the decline of local journalism. 

First I was intrigued; then I was hooked. 

She went further, saying (admittedly with some motherly bias) that I might be an investigative journalist one day, or even end up working for The Mill. She encouraged me to pitch — but I was 18, still in college, and unconvinced I had the experience to write for a publication that felt so out of reach. 

But it stuck with me, that idea: that one day, maybe I could be producing the kind of work The Mill was.

When I’d tell people I wanted to be a journalist, I was often met with genuine astonishment. “Journalism?” people would echo back at me, like I’d just said I wanted to do judo or jousting or some other rogue pastime I’m guaranteed to be horrendous at. “What future is there in that?” After all, newsrooms have been contracting — and salaries stagnating — in journalism for two decades now, i.e most of my lifetime.

The landscape looked bleak, but that only made The Mill’s success more galvanising. Anytime I’ve been asked where I hope to work one day, I think it’s assumed that I’ll go with the legacy media titles. Yet my spiel about The Mill had become so rote that I’d been unintentionally preparing for this job interview for years.

Two years ago, I emailed Mollie Simpson, asking if she would meet me for a coffee to give me career advice. She had joined this company straight out of university in 2021 and was now writing award-winning stories. She agreed to meet and was incredibly encouraging. I obviously never expected to be the person chosen to fill her shoes.

After following The Mill for so long, it feels more than a little surreal to be transitioning from reader to reporter. And while I’ve admired the big investigations and the award nominations, I think it boils down to more than that.

The Mill’s long-form, narrative style offers something I don’t see at other local outlets: the ability to leave a reader with the impression that, on finishing an article, they’ve held a life in their hands, and understood their city more intimately because of it.

Against all odds, the team has proven how much people still want high-quality journalism about their community – about my community, about Manchester. I couldn’t feel prouder to be a part of it.