Founded to inspire a renaissance in high quality journalism in the UK, Mill Media has received financial backing from Sir Mark Thompson, the former head of the BBC and New York Times, and has been described as "one of the most interesting and impressive media startups of the last decade" by the FTs John Burn-Murdoch.
Our journey started when Joshi Herrmann founded The Mill as a one-man-band in June 2020, a few months into the pandemic. The idea was very simple: would people start valuing and paying for local news again if it was done in a completely different way? More in-depth; more nuanced; with stories that were more enjoyable to read and weren’t covered in horrible advertising.
From there, we have grown into a fully-fledged media company. We now have have publications in six cities – including The Tribune in Sheffield and The Post in Liverpool, The Dispatch in Birmingham, The Bell in Glasgow and The Londoner in the capital – and more than 150,000 people have joined our mailing lists. Crucially, more than 9,000 members pay for and support our journalism, come to our events and shape what we cover.
In 2023, we raised money from a group of investors including CNN chief executive Sir Mark Thompson, media investor Turi Munthe, the leading economist Dame Diane Coyle and Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston. Thompson told the Guardian: “I’m backing The Mill because of the exceptional quality of its journalism and because it’s such an interesting and encouraging initiative. Britain’s cities need great commercially-sustainable journalism to inform the public and hold powerful institutions to account. That’s what The Mill and its sister publications were founded to do, and what they are consistently achieving.”
