The Mill's Joshi Herrmann on building profitable local news

Joshi Herrmann is the founder of The Mill, a newsletter focused on Manchester – England, not New Hampshire, for those who call it “soccer” – as well as sister publications in Sheffield and Liverpool. Joshi started The Mill in June 2020, and across the three newsletters, the company has 45,000 email subscribers and has converted over 7% to paid subscribers. The Sheffield Post has 12,000 email subscribers and has managed to convert an impressive 950 to paid, according to Joshi. The company is near profitability with a small full-time staff augmented with freelancers.

The common knock on the newsletter model applied to local journalism is that it can’t scratch much beyond the surface, and it tends to be mostly aggregation of original reporting still done by local newspapers, however depleted they are. The Mill and its sister titles are leaning on original reporting and in-depth features as opposed to just aggregation or fluff about local events.