It’s been a bumpy summer for The Dispatch. Not in terms of readers — you’ve been wonderful. Nor tips; they’ve been flooding in. But we’ve been short staffed. Samuel’s been away for a month, reporting from Mexico. Kate had a well deserved holiday. The Dispatch is an engine running mainly on two key cogs, both of whom know and live in Brum, who love the city and the surrounding region. The brilliant Dan Cave has pitched in, and I’ve been helping out, but having a fully staffed office makes such a difference. When one of them is out of action, well… the cogs keep spinning but as you can imagine, they get a little hot.
And yet, they manage it. More than manage it. On a budget that could generously be described as ‘meagre’, The Dispatch’s two-person skeleton crew and paddling-pool of talented freelancers have produced some of the most in-depth and dedicated regular journalism Birmingham and the Black Country has enjoyed for decades. This summer we’ve covered everything from exclusive economic analysis of why Birmingham is falling behind Manchester as a ‘second city’ (drawing a written response from no less than Mayor Richard Parker) to the inside story of how 11 Labour councillors have been controversially deselected by the party. That’s alongside our historical deep dives into hop picking and a profile of the man responsible for maintaining one of Brum’s environmental crown jewels.
Our mission — some would call it a gamble — is to restore quality long-form local journalism to the region. It’s paying off. We don’t always please everyone but then we wouldn’t be journalists — we’d be publicists. Instead, our commitment is to hard work, diligence, and the truth.
Let me lay out the vision for The Dispatch. It’s not to beat The Mail or Birmingham Live at their own game. We’re looking further afield; we want The Dispatch to be a world-class paper, the kind of outlet that every big British city used to enjoy, with writing that takes you to the heart of a story that might have happened just streets away. A ‘people’s paper’, if you like. It’s a romantic notion but, we increasingly believe, a realistic one. In a news landscape that manages to be at once oversaturated and underserving, it’s what Birmingham needs and deserves.
We have the goal of The Dispatch becoming more than a paper — we want to build a community, one that would-be readers in other cities look at with envy. Our comment section is already lively, but we’d like to go further. We’ve got our second ever-event coming up and plan to host many more in the near future, taking our relationship with readers off the page.
We don’t get everything right — and our subscribers are some of the best secondary proof-readers I’ve ever encountered — but we strive towards the ideal. But we’d be a lot closer to that ideal if we had just a wee bit more breathing room. One extra Dispatch staffer. And to do that, we need a clutch of new people coming on board with their wallets.
You’ve seen what we can do with a team of two. Imagine the heights we can reach with an extra reporter. More investigations. More breaking news. More deep dives unpicking the complicated fabric of our region. But to do this we need more paid subscribers — our aim is to hit 2000 by the end of the year. It’s a goal within reach; we were actually on track to achieving it. But now we’re lagging a bit behind that. We’d love to change that.
So, we’ve reinstated our very popular introductory offer: £1 for a Dispatch membership for the first three months. That’s just £4 a month to support a renaissance in Birmingham’s local journalism.
We think what we offer is already great value for money. If you want to invest in us, and help us make that offering even better, now is the time. Here’s the goal: 200 new paying subscribers by the end of September and we can hire a new Dispatch reporter. If you think Birmingham deserves The Dispatch, and want to be part of the better we’re building, whip that bank card out now and sign up for just £4 a month for the first three months — less than £1 a week. Let’s see what we can really do with this paper.
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