West Yorkshire has a glorious journalism history. Help us to open a new chapter
For decades, visitors arriving from the west could be under no illusions: Leeds was a newspaper city.
Appearing like a vast concrete fortress, the Yorkshire Post headquarters on Wellington Street was the first thing you saw from the motorway. It was built to house 1,400 staff as well as an in-house social club and massive printing presses.
The building’s brutalist design was much derided, but its epic scale said something powerful when it was opened by Prince Charles in 1970. Something about Leeds as a counterweight to London’s Fleet Street media. Something, perhaps, about the ability of the North to tell its own story, and thereby fashion its own destiny.
The fortress was little mourned when it was demolished in 2014, but I believe we should mourn the waning of Leeds as a great hub of British journalism. And we should try our very best to buck the trend and build something new.
Losing to Big Tech
Today, the thought of 1,400 newspaper staff in this city is fanciful, let alone one building. By my estimate, there are fewer than 100 journalists covering the whole of West Yorkshire these days, including roughly 15 covering Leeds at the Yorkshire Evening Post, a fraction of its former strength. Some of these journalists are doing brilliant work, but they are up against industry forces way outside their control.
What happened? For over a century, newspapers were the best place to advertise everything from job vacancies to used cars, and the resulting ad revenue covered the salaries of countless local journalists. But in the past 20 years, that revenue has been gobbled up by tech giants like Google and Facebook, and local newspapers have shrunk dramatically.
Not just that, but skeleton teams of journalists have been asked to write more and more stories to feed the ravenous beast of internet traffic. Online ads favour quantity over quality, and clickbait headlines about local criminals and not-even-local celebrities outperform deeply reported stories about local issues. And so that’s increasingly what we get.
The alternative is a new brand of local news that is funded by readers rather than online advertising, and is therefore driven by and accountable to you rather than Big Tech algorithms. I didn’t realise this was possible until a few years ago, and now I want to make it happen in Leeds.
A lingering question
I’m from down the road in Sheffield, but I’ve spent a fair bit of time in this part of the world. My daughter was born in Leeds Children’s Hospital and I’ve had glorious weekends in the Calder Valley. My in-laws are up in Harrogate, but they’re not that posh, honest.
Until 2022, I was probably a bit like you. I wasn’t a journalist but I had heard about the decline of local news and noticed that there was less and less that I wanted to read in my local newspaper. I didn’t really understand why this had happened, or how things could be different.
Then I came across The Tribune in Sheffield: a brand new digital newspaper that sent out brilliant stories about the city via an email newsletter and suddenly gave me a much deeper understanding of the city I was living in. One day an investigative story about a local controversy would drop into my inbox. The next day it would be a beautiful human story about someone in the city whose life I had never thought about.
I was hooked, and soon became a paying member, spending less than the price of a couple of cappuccinos a month to get great quality local journalism. Before long, I had written to the editor asking to contribute geeky freelance articles about local economics, my professional specialism.
Four years later, and I’m a senior editor at Mill Media, the groundbreaking independent media company behind The Tribune. The company started in 2020 as a one-person newsletter in Manchester, and has since built a reputation as “the vanguard of quality journalism in England’s great cities”, to quote Patrick Maguire of The Times.
In the past year, we’ve published investigations that have won national awards and prompted police investigations. But we also produce the kind of great writing that makes people feel more connected to the places they live.
It’s a new model for local news, and as we’ve grown, one lingering question has dogged us. Why on earth haven’t you set up shop in Leeds?
“I’m baffled why Leeds and West Yorkshire has never been on the radar of this operation,” one commenter wrote under a Financial Times story about us in 2024. “It’s a journalism desert… Come to Leeds and I for one will pay!”
The moment has come
Well, as it happens, Leeds has been on our radar for years, and we get emails from people in West Yorkshire asking us about it all the time. But we’re a small team of 20 journalists, and launching in a new city is a risky and time-consuming process.
In truth, it was only when my daughter was born in this city (meaning I spent a month getting to know the city centre very well – why are there so many Caffe Neros?) that I decided we needed to give it a go.
I really believe a city this beautiful, historic, exciting and complicated deserves the very best journalism. When Leeds boomed before, it had plenty of mighty titles like the Leeds Mercury and Leeds Intelligencer. It was their journalism that highlighted the scandal of child slavery in the mills and campaigned to give Leeds its first elected MPs.
Leeds is growing quickly again, something you can see most visibly in the changing make up of the city centre. A city undergoing these changes is a fascinating place to be. It gains a new cast of characters: the founders and hustlers looking to get in on the action, the clean money and the dirty. It gains new questions too: who is riding the wave and who is being left behind? The city needs more journalists looking into these characters and asking these questions — chronicling this fascinating and turbulent time.
So here we are. We’re taking a gamble and we can only do it with your help.
If 500 readers pledge to become paying members in the next few weeks, we’ll launch a new outlet in Leeds, hire a couple of great local journalists, and rentour first newsroom in the city centre. It won’t be the size of Wellington Street Fortress, and we're not holding our breath that King Charles will pop back to open it. But it will be a start.
We’ve already started speaking to local journalists who want to join our team, but we can only hire them if we hit our target of 500 readers pledged to get things off the ground (get in touch if you’re interested in joining the team).
We’ll publish a few articles in the coming weeks to give you a feel for what our journalism looks and feels like. Please share these stories around – even if you just sign up for free you’ll receive them in your inbox and we’ll make them available online. At a bare minimum, we might end up as an obscure footnote in someone’s dissertation about local news in West Yorkshire during the 2020s.
But we’d like to do a little bit better than that. Actually, I’ll admit it – what we’d like to do is build something incredible here: a team that publishes the sharpest, funniest, and most interesting journalism about this part of the world. We want to become an essential part of the fabric of West Yorkshire; something that enriches your life, holds the powerful to account and builds a deep sense of shared community.
But we need your help. Click below to become one of our founding members, and thanks for taking a leap of faith with us.
