Dear Millers – 2024 is in its dog hours and the Met Office map is covered in yellow and amber (“Strong westerly winds...some travel disrupted”), so I have a captive audience for an end of year editor’s note.
This is supposed to be a day when we reflect on the year just been, and I’m thinking about a weekend in the Spring when I needed help and I knew where to find it. We all have certain people we turn to in particular types of distress: the friends who are good in a breakup; the relative who can help because they, more than anyone, know the backstory.
When someone wealthy or powerful is threatening to sue The Mill, I have a list of people I call. The first is Natalie McEvoy, who has the enviable job of reading our most contentious stories before they are published and advising me on how to lessen the chances of ending up in court. Natalie is extraordinary in her coolness; an anti-panicker. She used to work on the “claimant” side of cases (working for the people doing the suing) so she knows how you build a case in UK defamation law, and therefore who is likely to be bluffing.
Mostly, people who threaten to sue you are bluffing – they want you to think they are preparing to spend the next two years dragging you through financially ruinous hearings at the High Court. Your job as an editor is to know which bluffs to call and when the danger is sufficient to retreat or even fold.
After Natalie, I turn to the informal helpers: a group of lawyers I only bother in a crisis. One of them is an old colleague of mine whose role at a major media company means I had better not name him here. Then there are a couple of leading barristers in Manchester who have been Mill members for a long time. They usually know a bit about the people who are threatening to sue us – i.e., they too know the backstory.
On that weekend back in May, I called one of the barristers. Michael is a KC, and even though I don’t exactly know what being a King's Counsel means, it sounds extremely reassuring. I brought him up to date on the situation: the nightlife kingpin Sacha Lord was threatening to take us to court if we didn’t remove a story about one of his companies by 4pm on Tuesday 21 May and publish an apology. That gave us two days. The letter from his lawyers said:
“Should you refuse to comply with these reasonable requests, then our client reserves his right to issue proceedings against you without further notice in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in which he will seek substantial damages, injunctive relief and costs.”
Lord wasn’t just a close friend and advisor to the mayor Andy Burnham, he was also a wealthy adversary – the co-founder of the very successful Warehouse Project club nights and Parklife Festival. The story we published showed that one of Lord’s companies had obtained almost half a million pounds of pandemic relief funds from the Arts Council by submitting a grossly misleading application.
I told Michael that I thought the story was robust. We had the application document that the company had submitted to the Arts Council and it was clearly full of lies, portraying a company that had only ever operated as a security firm as something very different — a multifaceted arts production company that was “the backbone of the national creative events sector”. Lord, who built his public profile during the pandemic by styling himself as a champion of struggling small businesses, had gained a massive chunk of public money for his security company via a glaring deception.
Michael agreed there was no reason to withdraw the story and supported an idea I had just had while out on a walk: to publish the full application document and allow Mill readers to examine it for themselves. He also suggested a theatrical touch that hadn’t occurred to me because I’m not a courtroom barrister: a counter-offer. If Lord could provide evidence that his company was more than a security company by his own deadline of 4pm on Tuesday, then we would happily take down the story and apologise. And in the meantime, the army of Millers would be doing the job that the Arts Council should have done originally: to scrutinise the application and see what else they could find. I thanked him and sat down at the desk I’m sitting at right now to draft an emergency editor’s note.
“Someone has to be wrong here: either we are wrong and we’ve made a mistake with our story,” I wrote. “Or if we’re right, Lord and the Arts Council are wrong and the GMCA has made a serious error of judgement by siding with its advisor rather than investigating him.”
The response was astonishing. In the following 48 hours, hundreds of people got in touch with us to offer tips about the story or just to send their support. Hundreds more joined as paying members. Both the Arts Council and the GMCA reversed their positions and said they would investigate. And we heard nothing from Lord in response to our request. Instead, he told The Times that he had “instructed a specialist defamation KC and solicitors” to sue The Mill: a commitment to sabre-rattling the like of which I’d never seen before. Two days later — while still maintaining that our story was wrong — he withdrew his legal threat.
I recall this story on the last day of 2024 because it contains an important lesson – and provides me with my new year’s resolution too. The lesson is that journalism, when done well, really is a team game. The team required to get that one story up (and keep it up) involved brilliant reporting from Jack and Mollie, the help of sources who were willing to trust us, the advice of lawyers like Natalie and Michael, extra help from student journalists who came into the office to lend a hand when the tips started rolling in, and then a huge wave of backing and support from our community. Suddenly, because of that big team, the tables were turned.
The resolution is to strengthen the bond between our members and our team in 2025. When I started The Mill, I spent quite a lot of time on the phone with the first Millers who signed up. They would email me about where they lived and what jobs they did and I would ask them for advice and expertise. That’s how I got to know Michael, a relationship that has paid off many times over.
Our reporters still get a lot of story tips from readers, but we don’t spend enough time asking you about your lives in different part of Greater Manchester and what we should be reporting on and how we can use The Mill to keep you better informed and connected. We need to hold more events, but we also need to create more dialogue with people who aren’t helping us on specific stories and might not want to attend an event in person.
For now, a huge thank you for reading and supporting us this year – a year of great journalism, a big award nomination and even a visit to the office from Bernie Sanders. It’s a privilege to do this job, and I’m incredibly grateful to be doing it with this team of reporters, editors and readers. When Mollie sent out her list of favourite stories of the year the other day – including Sophie’s brilliant reporting on the Carlton Club, Ophira’s piece on Rice and Three and Jack’s long read about Night & Day café – I felt enormously proud of what we’re achieving.
If you have ideas for how I can deliver on my resolution next year, please get in touch or tell me in the comments. And if you’re not yet a Mill member, why not make it your new year’s resolution to become more informed and more connected in 2025? Think of it as a gym membership but one that costs much less and that you will continue to use beyond January 15th. Not only do our members get incredible stories they won’t find anywhere else, they also make it possible for us to produce lots of free journalism for others who can’t afford to pay.
Happy new year to all of you and see you in 2025.
Joshi
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