A note about The Dispatch

1am emails and why we need your help

Dear Patchers, most of you won’t know who I am, so I should start with a little introduction. I founded Mill Media, the company that brought The Dispatch into being last year, and in a previous life, I wrote for newspapers like The Guardian, The Times and The Evening Standard.

It was an email from Kate to me around this time last year that started the process of launching this wonderful new publication. Kate was working at the Birmingham Mail and had been following the progress of The Mill, the newsletter that I started on my own during the pandemic publishing long reads about life in Manchester. She said she wanted to do the kind of journalism we were doing, and after choosing a name and raising some external investment, we made it happen.

Since then, I’ve been heavily involved in The Dispatch, but mostly behind the scenes. I’ve popped up with an occasional story, like my piece about the Brummie railwaymen of Transylvania, and had a hand in a couple of our big investigations, but most of my role is to speak to Kate every couple of days to support and advise. We were both optimistic when we cooked up the idea of doing this, but it’s been enormously pleasing to see it taking off like it has.

It’s now six months since we turned on paying memberships on The Dispatch. That was the moment that things became serious and we began to learn how many people want this kind of journalism in the West Midlands and are willing to pay for it. As I write this, there are an astonishing 16,711 of you on the free mailing list and we just passed 750 paying members (we’re on 764 to be precise).

The Brummie railwaymen of Transylvania

Firstly, I want to say a huge thank you to those of you who are paying. You have vindicated something that Kate and I suspected: that people do want more of what we enjoy publishing — reporting that holds local institutions to account and the kind of writing that makes journalism enjoyable to read again. That’s what we’re trying to do here — offer a different kind of journalism that allows you to feel both more informed and better connected to the place you live.

When I look back at the six months since we turned on paid memberships, I’m incredibly proud of the stories we’ve managed to publish. There are the really big ones, like the three-part investigation we did into the appalling abuses of loopholes in the provision of supported housing, focusing on the collapse of companies run by a man called Gurpaal Judge. That kind of in-depth reporting — which was subsequently cited by the Financial Times — required a team of reporters and editors to examine documents and speak to anonymous sources over several months.

Some stories just came from Kate having deep sources in local communities, like when we were the first to report that a group of migrants had been secretly detained to be put on a flight to Rwanda. Ian Burrell’s great feature on sound system culture was picked up by the BBC and Jack Walton’s brilliant story about Station Street caught a developer changing their story about plans for a tower block.

Investigation: The spectacular rise and sudden fall of Gurpaal Judge

These stories are not just great pieces of journalism, they are also direct evidence of the impact that our members are having. By paying for a membership to The Dispatch, they are funding journalism that exposes corruption, spreads good ideas around the region and celebrates distinctive local culture. Within the space of six months, this publication already plays a vital role in the West Midlands and that will only grow in the years ahead.

Kate and I at the Mill Media office. Photo by: Mollie Simpson/The Dispatch.

Our next big goal is to reach 1,000 paying members (236 to go). We’ve recently announced that we are trying to hire a second full-time staff writer to work alongside Kate, which will make the work we do much more sustainable (I know from receiving messages from Kate at 1am that she needs some backup) and allow us to cover a broader range of stories. Getting to 1,000 will help us to fund that second salary and will give us another big sign that people want to see more of the work we’re doing.

If you’re not yet a member, it would make my week if you decided that this is the right moment to join up. Kate has put an enormous amount of work into The Dispatch and we are both huge believers that there is a long-term future for great writing and investigative journalism in this part of the world. For just £8 a month, or £1.53 a week if you take an annual subscription, you can vindicate that belief, join a great community and get a handful of fantastic extra members-only stories every month. Just hit that button below.