Two community-powered local outlets in Britain punching above their weight 

In an era of media consolidation and declining local coverage, two independent UK news outlets are charting a path forward for community journalism.

The Fix looked at the stories and models of two independent local media:

• The Bristol Cable, where the whole staff is composed of reporters and not editors and has developed a very particular investigative approach;
• the North East-London Waltham Forest Echo, part of the independent network of community newspapers run as social enterprises Social Spider.

The Bristol Cable: a cooperative for hard-hitting investigative journalism

“The Bristol Cable was started in 2014 by two friends who had just moved to Bristol, Adam Cantwell-Corn and Alon Aviram. The idea started around the exploration of different business models before they thought of making a newspaper,” Priyanka Raval of the Bristol Cable tells The Fix.

Several challenges followed, as Raval explains. “One thing was having a media owned by the people, instead of media conglomerates like Rubert Murdoch, with super cheap membership (£1 monthly). With your membership, you own your newspaper. Currently, we are 60% grant-funded and 40% members-funded. We have 2,500 members, but ideally, we would like to flip that to be at least 60% members-funded and 40% grant-funded”, Raval explains.

“Those who are members of the cooperative participate in an annual general meeting (AGM), and every big organisational decision will have to go through the members first. Internally, we run as a non-hierarchical organisation. We are all paid the same wage and we do not have editors”.

The Bristol Cable is part of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and has made investigations a crucial part of its journalist work. Such work comes with great challenges, as Raval explains.

“We do not have the budget of other media to have an in-house legal team. Seeking legal advice is extremely expensive, we do it very rarely, but it is necessary sometimes when it comes to investigations. We have been sued or threatened a handful of times.”

“The most serious threat to be sued that we had was when my colleague Matty Edwards wrote a piece about the Priory Hospital which was providing psychiatric services. If I think of an investigation of which I feel proud recently, that would be our work on systemic racism in the NHS Trust” says Rava.

Local stories have also jumped to national attention in Bristol over the years, like the toppling of the slaver Edward Colston’s statue in June 2020, or the Kill the Bill protests in March 2021; in both cases, the Cable was on the ground with its reporters, and they kept looking.

This is another element of interest in local journalism, as while the attention of nationwide media will inevitably move on from a local story, forms of slow journalism can be developed locally.

The Waltham Forest Echo: relying on the community 

The Waltham Forest Echo was founded in 2014 as an independent community newspaper covering the North-East London borough of Waltham Forest, with 15,000 free copies distributed monthly, and a daily updated website.

Discussing its business model, the outlet’s editor Marco Marcelline says: “Every couple of years, we organise a massive fundraiser. We are funded by supporters each month, paying £5, £7 a month, up to a £50 flat rate for a whole year (a third of our whole income), then there is advertising from local businesses or London-wide ones. Those are the main income streams; we have also announced our patron scheme, £500 per year, to reach £15,000 per year”.

Reaching that sum, as Marcelline points out, would help towards increasing the number of pages of the Echo newspaper and hiring a new reporter. Supporters also help keep the Echo accountable.

Marcelline highlighted the Echo’s coverage of local council-led asylum seeker evictions as an example of holding power accountable. “In January-February (2024) we were the first paper to publish stories about asylum seekers who were being kicked out of a hotel in Walthamstow. We broke that news story and followed up with other stories and we got so much interest because everyone started covering it, including the Daily Mail and the BBC”.

As well as the Bristol Cable, the Waltham Forest Echo is relying on readers to become stakeholders, propelling community journalism forward despite industry headwinds.

Source of the cover photo: generated by ChatGPT, DALL·E

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