Swindon deserves good journalism
In praise of the journalists who hold the powers that be to account
By Ink Editor Jamie Hill
I see The Ink as a call to arms for local journalism.
The industry has been on its knees for too long a time, and communities across the country have been suffering for it.
Local journalism is an absolutely necessary component of any working community.
It serves a purpose of not only informing the people but also of holding those in power to account so that everything they do can be properly scrutinised. This takes away their ability to ride roughshod over everybody else to fulfil their own agendas.
The promised land of an online cash bonanza has proved itself to be about as real as Narnia, with local newspaper companies on a national level focusing more on how to get more ‘clicks’ rather than any real love of the local area they purport to represent. They have swapped print pounds for digital pennies and we are all suffering because of it.
And that is why I am so passionate about what we do at The Ink but we need more readers to make this new concept work.
So, like Bob Geldof back in 1985, I am begging you to sign up and be a part of this at its very beginnings.
And we have a Winter Offer, where anyone who signs up now for the paid-for version will get the first three months free. It’s the ultimate try before you buy.
I’m not very good at this. I don’t mean at journalism. I think I’m fair to middling at that. I ‘journalese’ with the best of them (well maybe not the best, but at least with the ones who can spell although I’m pretty sure ‘journalese’ isn’t a word).
No. I mean I’m not very good at the talking about yourself. The bigging yourself up bits that you need to do to make your mark in the world. It just feels a bit insincere.
It’s why I would never make a good salesman.
It’s why I’m not good at networking events (my late dad used to describe them as ‘bullshit and biscuits’, which I thought was pretty apt).
It’s also why I’m not very good at LinkedIn. I’m just too cynical, probably the journalist in me, for the amount of humblebragging that powers that little corner of social media. I prefer to make a joke at my own expense and then kind of shuffle away, looking awkward.
But, at the moment, I have something that I want to brag about. Something that I’m passionate about and I feel I would be doing it a disservice if I didn’t shout about it from the rooftops.
Of course, I’m talking about The Ink.
In the north of England and Scotland there has been a groundswell in favour of similar sites to The Ink. A revolution in how the people digest their local news. The concept of an emailed paid-for news subscription service has really taken off there.
Edinburgh has the Edinburgh Minute. A synopsis of news at 7am every weekday morning. It’s great stuff.
But it was Manchester that started the revolution proper with The Mill, which has become a proper force for good journalism in that urban metropolis.
In fact, it’s proven itself so successful that the people behind The Mill, led by a man called Joshi Herrmann, helped launched The Post in Liverpool, The Tribune in Sheffield and more recently The Dispatch in Birmingham.
A newly-born news subscription group of titles that are the pioneers of this new concept in journalism.
Earlier this year, I thought to myself that Swindon deserves something like this. A pioneering publication that favours long-form journalism really looking into what makes the town tick.
Swindon has always felt like a bit of an underdog compared to the surrounding towns and cities of Cheltenham, Oxford, Reading, Bath and Bristol.
But it’s always been an ambitious underdog and if there’s one thing I know about this town is that there are plenty of civic-minded people who are striving to make it better.
To do that, we need to be properly informed. Bad news should no longer be swept under the carpet and good news should be telegraphed far and wide. It’s hard to make progress in the dark. So The Ink is a means of illumination. Of shining a light on aspects of the town so that we can make it better.
Lofty ideals I know.
For the past eight years I have been the man behind Swindon Link having taken over from the legendary journalist and publisher Roger Ogle. The monthly free community magazine that is as much a part of the fabric of the Swindon community as The Link Centre (in fact there is some argument that The Link Centre’s name actually derives from the magazine).
One of the things that I love about Swindon Link is how it serves a real community purpose in the town. It really is a publication that ties the sometimes disparate areas of the town together. It is a positive publication which always accentuates the good.
But it is limited by being monthly, printed and free. It’s hard to break news when it only comes out once a month. And because it is free, printed and paid for by advertising, it doesn’t have the space or freedom to really get under the skin of the town.
And that is where The Ink comes in. There’s no advertising in The Ink. It is completely unfettered. It is paid for directly by the readers as it is a publication built on an engaged audience who care about the town they live in. And it is emailed directly to you without the need to find it amongst the cacophony of noise on the internet and social media.
We wanted to create something new and different for the town. Where we would pick one story or issue a day and really delve down into it offering real insight.
It’s also a place for good writing as it is our goal to create something interesting that will hold your attention through our Ink Piece columnists as well as give you a summary of the news of the day courtesy of Swindon Link.
We are also ambitious, with plans in place to introduce a whole Monday sports section in 2024.
At the moment there are four Inks a week. Our Friday Inks are currently free and go out to all subscribers whether they are free or paid and our Thursday Inks are where we do a focus each week covering Business, Heritage, Education and Food & Drink.
We know it is a new concept and it’s a lot for people to get their heads around.
But it does need to be paid for as that is how we are able to exist, so every new paid subscriber we get helps us to survive and hopefully flourish.
It might take some time but I have every faith that Swindon will embrace this new concept.
But at the same time, I have nothing but praise for the Swindon Advertiser.
In fact, I cut my teeth as a young journalist at The Adver, having been its political correspondent as well as its chief reporter in the mid-2000s. This was before I was tempted away to found my own irreverant arts and culture magazine called The Ocelot.
There was something about being in a busy newsroom at the centre of the town. The adrenaline when a story broke was palpable. You felt you were really at the heart of things especially when the print presses below you would start whirring into life only minutes after you sent over the front page story.
It was a multi-facetted machine. And it was there wholly for Swindon.
But over the past couple of decades, like newspapers up and down the country, it has faced a consistent decline.
The print works are no longer at Newspaper House, with the printing now being down in Oxford. The sub-editors have also all been moved into central offices far from Swindon.
And to top it all, the number of journalists have fallen quite considerably, with the Swindon Advertiser now no longer even having its own exclusive editor as he also has the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald and the Wiltshire Times resting on his shoulders.
As a town with a population of 225,000 people, Swindon deserves better.
And Newspaper House on Victoria Road stands empty, with the Swindon Advertiser now based in Dorcan. You can still see the Swindon Advertiser logo at the Dorcan site but it’s dwarfed by one for LocalIQ (whatever that is!)
The current crop of journalists at the town’s local newspaper nevertheless do a hell of a job keeping us informed, despite being under-resourced and having faced a couple of decades’ worth of steady decline.
Local newspaper journalists also, it must remembered, do a good job despite salaries that are generally far from generous.
I know the local newspaper industry has been suffering and leaking money like a sieve.
In November Reach PLC, formerly Trinity Mirror, which runs regional newspapers across the country including the Manchester Evening News, announced cuts of 450 jobs. This is on top of 330 redundancies earlier in the year.
Newsquest, which owns the Swindon Advertiser, has also faced the uphill struggle that other newspaper companies have faced - hence the cuts that we’ve seen over the past 20 years.
Like everyone else, Newsquest has fallen under the sway of online clicks, with upper management focussing on that rather than creating a publication that really serves the town they are in. It is only the hard-working and under-resourced reporters who still make The Adver so important.
I wouldn’t want the Swindon Advertiser going anywhere. It might sound contradictory whilst I’m also trying to sell you the virtues of The Ink, but this town needs its local traditional newspaper. It has served the town since 1854 and it would be a massive blow for Swindon if it were ever to not be there.
As a newspaper it can’t rely on its traditional job, property and classified advertising for revenue. Those have all gone to the internet.
But it can rely on us as readers to actually pick up the newspaper and buy it.
It is why this new concept of a news subscription service like The Ink is vitally important. There’s definitely room for The Adver, Swindon Link and The Ink in the town. The more the merrier for the betterment of the town.
At the moment, The Ink is still a small affair.
We have 237 subscribers as we write this but we need more to grow and take on more reporters. That is still a good number, seeing as we only launched in July.
On day to day duties it is me, Barrie Hudson, a 21-year veteran of The Adver himself, and Amanda Wilkins, as well as contributors from across the town. In my opinion we have been doing a hell of a job covering a broad range of stories which are vitally important for Swindon.
We want this to continue and we are eternally grateful to all of those who have already subscribed, but to do this we need more subscribers.
So please sign up now so we can continue to do good work.
At the moment, if you sign up you can get your first three months free before you have to pay a penny.
But after that it is only £5.99 a month to be with us from the ground floor. That’s less than a bottle of Diet Coke a week.
So in the voice of Bob Geldof - ‘Give us your money!’ (Well not much of it. Just £5.99 a month, which is a steal for what you get in return!)