Dear readers,
I’m both very excited, and very scared, all at the same time.
We’re now in the last week of our epic campaign to launch a new outfit in Leeds. Here’s where the tracker stands at the moment:
We’re well over two-thirds of the way to our target. The hype is palpable. My inbox is heaving with people getting in touch, asking to join the team. I’m being pitched story ideas left, right and centre. There’s clearly masses for us to get our teeth into.
But we need one last push if we’re going to actually make it happen. And this is why I’m scared – that having come so close we might not pull it off.
Since the beginning we’ve had one question: is there enough interest in West Yorkshire for us to launch a new paper? It feels like it – certainly, people often tell us they’d like us to open here. But it’s easy to want something to happen; putting up some actual hard cash is quite a different matter.
Ultimately, that’s what we need. We’re always clear with readers that the only way to get in-depth journalism is if people pay for it. If you run a newspaper just on ads, you’re forever going to be chasing clicks – leading to attention grabbing headlines, but not much beneath them.
Last week we put out an example of our reporting — a deep dive into the new bike lanes popping up around the place. We've had some great comments on that article, and spawned a really thoughtful conversation on reddit. This is exactly what we want to bring to the table: giving you a nuanced view, sparking a discussion and letting you make your own mind up.
We’ve got just one week left to get the remaining 151 extra pledges and make it happen. With 500 people behind us, we could be confident that there’s enough hunger here for in-depth reporting that we can make a go of it. We’ll find a team, choose a name, design up a website and launch later in the spring.
But if that interest isn’t there, we’ll have to have a rethink.
It feels like a real stretch to get there in just a week. But I have hope. It's my deep belief that real, in-depth local news reporting is just as important as ever, and that people do care enough to support it. I know that's true because already so many people have got behind us. Now we just need to find another 151 of them.
