Five years of The Mill

Dear Millers – we were supposed to publish a big investigative piece today, but I've pushed it to tomorrow morning, a decision borne of pure sentimentality. That's what you can do when you run a media company – arbitrarily change the schedule so that you can write a personal editor's note to your readers to mark a big occasion.

It was five years ago, almost to the hour, that I sent out the very first Mill newsletter, which would have reached a larger audience if I'd stood up and read it out loud in my local pub. There were 24 Millers on the list, and not all of them opened the email. The first-ever work of Mill journalism concerned a viral tweet about a racist attack on a Chinese takeaway in Blackburn, which had been shared by MPs and celebrities and been viewed more than 250,000 times.

Except, some of the comments under the tweet said it might not have happened in Blackburn. And closer examination of the video suggested it was actually a chippy (an important distinction). Getting those details wrong suggested that the academic who had posted the tweet might not have mastered all the details of the incident he was sharing to a massive global audience. So I invested a major chunk of my afternoon trying to work out where the chippy was so that I could speak to them.

My long afternoon trying to verify a viral video of a racist attack on a Chinese takeaway

It’s been called ‘The ugly face of corona related racism’

The MillThe Mill

I decided my best chance of identifying the business was a fun fair poster on the pin-board in the background of the grainy video. But there was an obvious problem: for all their considerable gifts at operating Ferris wheels and coconut shies, the people who put on fun fairs lack imaginative flair when it comes to their marketing. A "reverse image search" of the poster on Google brought up hundreds of fun fair posters. They looked almost identical.

This whole search began to feel like a forlorn quest, especially given that a maximum of 24 people would read my investigation.

I tried one more thing. I slowed down the video and started taking screenshots. In one of them, I could just about make out the dates of the fun fair. This allowed me to search for fun fairs on Facebook on those dates. Very soon, I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the fun fair calendar in the North West (which is extensive), until I found a poster that looked right: Heywood Fun Fair.

The amateur sleuthing continued:

Assuming that fun fairs are usually pretty local events, and therefore that posters for Heywood’s fun fair would probably only be advertised in Heywood itself, I started lurking around the town on Google Street View, trying to find Chinese takeaways or chip shops with the shape of windows and the type of door visible in the video. None of the ones listed prominently on Yell or Trip Advisor matched the video, and the grassy bank with trees visible across the road in the video was easy to check for.

Eventually, I found the place. Summit Chippy, on Bury New Road, which I'm glad to see is still going strong. The chippy's staff told me about what had happened: a drunk man had come into their shop and repeatedly punched the plastic screen separating the shop’s staff from customers. The incident was terrifying, one staff member said, but she insisted it was “nothing racist”.

Finally, we had a first-hand account of this story from the people involved, and it didn't align with what the viral tweet had said, even in its basic details like where the incident took place. When I emailed the academic who had posted the video to give him the real details, he wrote back: "I am not going to comment on your article, and I will not be taking the video down.”

That was the birth of The Mill! A long afternoon peering at fun fair posters to try to fact check a viral video on social media; a small attempt to establish the truth and contribute to a standard of reality that we can all agree and rely upon. We all see these viral social media posts every day, but as I wrote in that first newsletter, "most people don’t have time to spend a few hours checking out a video they find, and there are fewer and fewer journalists paid to do that kind of work."

Someone who definitely did have time was me. I had all the time in the world. Many of our lives were in limbo in June 2020, a few months into the pandemic, but mine was deeper in limbo than most. The pandemic had forced me to abandon my plan for the year: living in Brno, the Moravian city where a lot of my Jewish relatives came from, learning Czech at the university where my grandfather studied in the 1930s, and then writing a book about my family's experiences in the Holocaust.

After a month doing that (Czech is extremely difficult to learn, by the way), Covid-19 forced me to come home. I was living with my mum, helping my sister in her garden and looking for something new to do. And that's when I came up with the idea for The Mill: a re-imagined local newspaper that would publish a tiny number of stories but would try to make them really good. Would people pay for that?

I guess the answer is... yes. Five years on, this editor's note is going out to 57,822 people rather than 24. And the income we get from our 3,500 paying members funds a team of four full time journalists in our office on St Ann's Square who are doing astonishingly good work. If you include our sister titles in Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and London, we have 169,902 readers signed up and more than 10,000 paying members, funding a team of 20 journalists across the country.

I would like to think that our journalism has made a contribution to the city. When I started out, Manchester felt like it was blasting off like a rocket from Cape Canaveral but without much understanding of where the rocket was going and who was funding it and what the trade offs would be for choosing one destination over another.

I hope our reporting has changed that a bit and made Manchester a little bit more legible to you, and a bit more accountable too. Our big investigations – like Mollie's work on the University of Greater Manchester and Jack's reporting on Sacha Lord – show that if you want to blow the whistle on something in this city, there is now somewhere you can go.

But for me personally, the best thing about the past five years has been how fun it’s been. That's what I thought about when I re-read that first ever Mill story last night – you can tell from reading it that despite the seriousness of the subject matter, I was having a lot of fun.

I hope it’s been fun for you, too. When I started out, I wanted to create a brand of local journalism that didn’t feel dreary or formulaic but that people would enjoy reading. Stories that would make you feel something. Pieces that might give people little moments of joy, connection and recognition.

A lot of my favourite Mill stories aren't big investigations but beautiful features that I couldn't imagine reading anywhere else – like Sophie Atkinson's piece about hunting for the Secret Garden in Salford, Dani Cole's piece about the ginnel gardens or Ophira's feature on Lancashire poetry and the Rochdale tram line.

These are the kind of stories you get when you let people with incredible heart and talent follow their noses. Sophie was a massive part of making this company a success, as was Dani. Ophira is our newest staff writer and is already a fan favourite, as is our editor and occasional football correspondent Jack Walton.

Mollie and Jack Dulhanty both joined us in the early days, straight after graduating from university, and now they're doing journalism that gets nominated for national awards, prompts police investigations and gets mentioned in parliament.

To be working with this amazing group of people five years after I sent that first newsletter is a great blessing. Thank you all for your tremendous help and support – here's to another five years.