The moment has come! Our campaign is under way. Can you help?

Dear all — it’s Joshi here. The day has come! We’re officially launching our first ever Mill Membership Campaign: a major push to bring quality local journalism to a huge new audience across the city. 

Our aim is to add 1,000 new paying members over the next few weeks, with an initial ‘pay what you want’ offer. But we need your help getting the message out. Please click the button below and share the link with friends and colleagues.

🗞️ 50,000 copies of a special print edition of The Mill have just come off the presses. As I write this, Ophira, Maisy and the two Jacks are putting copies into the hands of commuters on St Peter's Square, and we're hoping Millers will be running around every town, village and suburb with bags full of copies in the coming days.

I felt incredibly proud when I arrived at the office yesterday and saw the stacks of newspapers everywhere, and the team hard at work to prepare for launch day. This campaign is the biggest moment of publicity we’ve ever had, and we hope that it will introduce thousands of Mancunians to great local journalism and seriously magnify our impact.

How you can take part

Here are two things I’d love you to do to give the campaign a huge boost on day one: 

1. Tell your friends: Send the link to our site - manchestermill.co.uk – to friends, family, colleagues, the postie – whoever you think might want to join us as a member! Tell them they can pay as little as £0 for the first two months. If just 500 members sign up two friends each, we will hit our target and there will be wild celebrations on Cross Street.
2. Share on social media: Share a link to our site on your Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky – whatever you use – to tell your followers about the campaign. Tell them why you’re a Miller, and why you think they should be too. We’ve even created a unique sharing link generator, so you can keep track of how many new Millers have joined up thanks to you.

❄️ Give us a hand: If you can’t imagine a better way to spend a cold winter morning than delivering copies of our print edition, please get in touch. Tell us how many copies you’d like to have, where you are based and where you can give them out and we’ll bring them to your door in the next few days.

Our campaign pledges

If we hit our target, we’re going to fulfill a set of pledges that were chosen by you. The pledges are our attempt to make Manchester a better place in 2026 — a city where people are better informed, where young people get access to good quality information and where good news is celebrated. Here they are:

I’m incredibly excited about what the next few weeks will bring. It’s five years since I started The Mill as a one man band, and it’s amazing what we’ve achieved since then. You have all been a major part of that, and now I hope we can use this platform to bring positive solutions to some of the problems that our city faces, and introduce good quality local journalism to a much wider audience in Manchester. 

Here’s what you can do right now to spread the word:

• Tell your friends: Share the link to our site - manchestermill.co.uk - with friends, family and colleagues - and tell them this is their one chance to pay what they can for a membership for the first two months. Tell them why you’re a member and why you think they would like The Mill.
• Share on social media: Share our link on social media or click here to generate your unique sharing link so you can track how many of your friends have joined up. Personalised posts that explain what you like about The Mill tend to perform best.

I look forward to seeing your posts and I hope you enjoy the print edition when you get hold of it. We will update you regularly about how things are going in the days to come, and there's a counter on our site showing how many members we've added in the campaign.