Dear Millers – we have less than four days left in our campaign and we're tantalisingly close to hitting our target. According to the counter on our site, which we are all monitoring like gambling addicts refreshing the live score of a second division Swiss handball game, we're currently on 833 new members. So we just need to add another 167 before Sunday night to get to 1,000 and fulfil our pledges.
It's been a huge effort by so many Millers who believe in our mission and the importance of high quality local journalism in this city. So many of you have signed up friends, shared on social media and even spread the word on Sunset Boulevard.
Tomorrow and Saturday, we are hoping to publish intriguing updates about two stories that you have been following closely on The Mill. This may sound overly cryptic, but if you happen to know anything about something called the Centre for Islamic Finance, please get in touch. In today's edition, Jack Walton admits the terror he feels about having to go into schools next year, which he will be forced to do if we hit the target.
If you want to join The Mill as a paying member, and choose your price for your first two months of membership, click below. You now have less than four days left to do it. We've done this offer so you can pay what you think a membership is worth, and then have two months to work out if it's giving you value and whether you want to carry on. You can cancel very easily at any time. Thanks for helping to get to our campaign target.
Make 2025 a cultural Christmas with Factory International's festive programme
Down at Aviva Studios there's an incredible range of events and activities to make this Christmas really special. Next week, three immersive lightroom shows are opening, one on Tom Hanks' The Moonwalkers and another on VOGUE, joining the immensely popular David Hockney show. There are fashion, sculpture and crochet workshops, plus winter family drop-ins with free activities for kids. And, of course, lot of free festive music with local choirs and orchestras taking to the stage.
Click below to see the full programme.
Your Mill briefing
🚃 Four more days of strikes have been announced by unions representing workers at Transport for Greater Manchester. Both Unite and Unison workers will be walking out over Christmas in a dispute over pay. The strikes re-commence tomorrow, and the other days are 13, 19 and 20 December. Industrial action by TfGM workers began in October, after a 3.2% pay increase was rejected. Unite say they are insisting on a raise which “reflects the rising cost of living and the increased workloads they have taken on since the creation of the Bee Network”.
🏳️🌈 A new-look Manchester Pride in 2026 could be a cheaper, “home-made” affair, according to city centre spokesperson Pat Karney, amid hopes the city council will step in and offer support to revive the event in some form. We broke the news that Pride was on the verge of collapse earlier this year, detailing how long-standing financial issues had come to a head this year after a failed bid to host EuroPride and a financially disastrous Mardi Gras event at the Mayfield Depot. Karney told the BBC a new, homespun approach would be needed, with "none of these Hollywood stars, exorbitant salaries and fees.” He added: "There's plenty of artistic talent in Manchester.”
🏚️ Work has been completed on the roof to Rochdale’s Hopwood Hall, the building at the centre of a long-running battle (and High Court case) between Rochdale council and American filmmaker Hopwood DePree, who believes he is the ancestral owner of the hall. DePree was at the centre of work to rescue the dilapidated building between 2017 and 2024, having discovered that it had belonged to his family for 400 years, even publishing a book called Downton Shabby in that time. Having left his life in LA behind now almost a decade ago, DePree remains at loggerheads with the council, who say any sale to him will depend on whether he can put forward a commercially viable business plan. If you’re interested in reading more about Hopwood’s Hollywood fairy-tale, here’s last year’s piece.
Societal fragmentation, talking to teenagers and why teachers are already getting in touch
By Jack Walton
A couple of months ago, the Mill team agreed to finish our work early for the day, gather in our editor Joshi's office, and put our minds to a novel challenge. The task was to create a long list of 'pledges' — things we could commit to doing in 2026 that might help to improve how we serve the city and address, in a modest way, the challenges that we all see around us.
For two hours, we brainstormed. No idea was deemed to be too stupid to raise, which resulted in some ideas that were too stupid to raise (starting an officially credentialed Mill journalism school with dozens of students), and we eventually ended up with about 40 options which we could send to our members to vote on. We thought a hundred or so might take the survey, but in the end, more than 500 Millers weighed in, ranking their favourites and sending in ideas for how to tweak them in order to make them more focused or relevant.
Several people said that our ambition to fulfil ten pledges was bonkers, and we should focus on doing a smaller number really well. So we eventually landed on the six most popular pledges and jointly committed to fulfilling them if we could add 1,000 new members in our campaign.
Because of this democratic process, there is no pre-determined thread running through them, but I can certainty spot patterns. There clearly seems to be a lot of concern about the world younger people are growing up in; the lost opportunities and the rampant spread of online misinformation.
On that note, the most popular pledge of all is to head into local schools and give talks on misinformation. Throughout the campaign, it’s been remarkable how many head teachers and people working in education have contacted us to ask if we would consider their schools. (If we haven’t got back to you yet don’t worry, we will!). It’s evident, particularly for people working in schools at the moment, that this one matters.
I’ll be honest, this is the pledge that scared me slightly when we first looked at the voting. I picture myself, terrified before a sea of 13-year-old boys, sheepishly asking: "who do we trust more kids: Andrew Tate or a responsible local journalist?" Cue a sea of hands for the latter, at which point I segue into a diatribe about the dangers of misinformation (“and no guys, there is nothing ‘gay’ about vigorous fact-checking”).
This, I state with endless relief, is not the plan. We aren’t going to be marching into schools and confiscating phones, or boring everyone to tears with a monologue about the dangers of Big Tech. But we are going to talk about how you can spot bogus videos and posts, why that matters, and maybe how to learn some Mill-style fact-checking techniques. Because frankly, this is something teachers and parents all across the country are rightly really scared about — for children who are spending huge amounts of their lives online to be able to sift between what’s real and what’s not is critical to the future functioning of our democracy.
The pledge I personally like the most, is our mentorship programme. I don’t just say this as a veiled shot at our competitors, but it's something we hear over and over again whenever we hire for a new job. In recent months, for example, we received almost 200 applications for our staff writer role. In so many of those interviews, especially those with writers in their early or mid twenties, we heard a similar message: that they had no experience of doing Mill-style journalism yet, but would love the opportunity to. It’s not that they haven’t tried hard enough, it’s that the opportunities don’t exist.
I felt the same when I left university, moved to Manchester and was looking for somewhere to get some bylines under my belt. I ended up briefly interning at a paper in Wigan, in a role that consisted mostly of scrolling through local Facebook groups and clock-watching. It’s a theme we touched upon recently in our piece about the lost newspapers of Greater Manchester: the once-great institutions with thronging newsrooms and large editorial teams which have been hollowed and immiserated in the digital era. Simply, as a young journalist, especially one outside of London, there is virtually nowhere to go and learn your trade properly, and to work on quality stories as you do so. If we can create somewhere that you can do that in Manchester, it will create an amazing pipeline of highly talented people who would go onto great success. The talent exists, but the opportunity doesn’t.
When I look at the pledge list, the other thing that jumps out is the sense that people, especially young people, feel increasingly disenfranchised. The country feels like a different place to even when we started The Mill five years ago. A lot of that has to do with social media, surely, and the fact that if you pop ‘Manchester’ into TikTok you’ll be greeted by scenes from what appears to be a lawless banana republic. People see this and feel disconnected from the places around them, and powerless to do anything constructive about it.
The miserable success-rate of our recent prime ministers is redolent, to me, of the miserable success rate of the past decade of Manchester United managers. Like sure, they were all in their own ways pretty crap (see Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's criminal insistence on Scott McTominay as a deep-lying midfielder, or the fact that Ruben Amorim would seemingly rather gouge his own eyes out with his thumbs than give Kobbie Mainoo a crack) but when every single one fails spectacularly you really do have to start looking at the underlying factors.
Where am I going with this? If we make good on our pledges to give free Mill subscriptions to first-time voting teens ahead of elections and to dedicate a reporter to politics full-time coverage during campaign season, Sir Keir Starmer will be forced to pull his finger out and this great Isle will see out the 2020s in roaring prosperity? Perhaps! But really, the point is more that we believe the solutions to disenfranchisement this country is currently experiencing will have to come largely at the local level.
Look at your local Facebook group. Sure, there’s probably some local stuff there — adverts for things for kids to do over half term and upstart nail technicians. Maybe a rant or two about unneighbourly behaviour. But you’ll also see a lot of angry posts about national issues — pictures of dinghies and apocalyptic prophecies. Perhaps it’s completely made-up nonsense, perhaps there’s a grain of truth torn from its context – the point is more that there is so much anger about the state of the country and things that people ultimately feel powerless to affect.
The reason The Mill has been the success it has been over the past five years is because: a) people do care about what is happening locally and b) people feel as though they are part of it. It doesn’t exist a million miles from its readership, you can actually be part of a community, get involved in campaigns like this one or have a pop at us when you think we’ve got it wrong. It isn’t perfect, but I hope it represents a slightly more positive model of how we should engage with the issues around us. I hope also that these six pledges represent us taking that model a bit further.
Obviously, the ideal situation for us financially and in terms of effort would be for Midnight to arrive on Sunday with our counter in the high 990s. A near-ton of new members in the bag, no obligation to have to go through the logistically-taxing and expensive process of setting up all these talks and schemes.
But actually, the prospect of doing this stuff, and contributing to this city in ways that go beyond our journalism, has been a huge motivating factor for the team over these past weeks. I hope, too, that the thought has given succour to the many wonderful Millers who have headed out into the streets of Manchester with their print bundles under their arms, spreading our message far and wide. We’re nearly there now, we’re nearly there.
Three days remain, 167 more subscribers to find. One big final push and we'll make it. To help us hit our target we’re offering you the opportunity to pay whatever you can afford for your first two months of membership. If you don’t think you’re getting good value in that time period you can simply quit and lose nothing. But if you do want to stay you’ll become part of our mission to rebuild what has been lost in the past few decades, and help us unlock six amazing pledges for Manchester.
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