Happy New Year from The Tribune!

Good morning readers. On this, the final day of 2024, Victoria, Daniel and I just wanted to send you one final edition of The Tribune to thank you for all your support this year. Whatever you’re doing tonight, we hope you have a great time and that 2025 brings you everything you hope for.

I’ve written four of these end-of-year pieces now, and whenever I do, I think back to the Christmas and New Year of 2020. That year I was stuck in my Park Hill flat having tested positive for Covid just days before Christmas. I did manage a few Zoom calls with friends and family, and I went for some walks in my state-mandated outdoor exercise time, but to say it was a depressing period would be something of an understatement.

However, as well as being a strange, anxious time, that New Year was the start of something too. 2021 was just a few days old when I met a journalist called Joshi Herrmann for the first time. He had set up a new publication called The Mill in Manchester and was considering expanding the model to other cities. That first meeting, on a dark, wet, cold January day at the beginning of the second Covid lockdown, was the first stirrings of what would become The Tribune.

Over the course of the next few months, we put together a plan, and began publishing at the end of March. Writing this almost four years to the day since that first meeting, it’s amazing how far we’ve come. As you know, our model rests on getting members to pay for our journalism. The first milestone we were aiming for was 700, which we thought was enough to make The Tribune viable. Now, as we enter our fifth year of existence, we have just passed 2,500 members.

My first thought when I read The Mill in 2020 was that this was the future. The success The Tribune has had since has proved my first impressions correct. By the time I left The Star in May 2021, it was obvious that the model followed by the traditional local media of churning out vast quantities of content and plastering it with so many ads that it becomes impossible to read had failed. Lots of industry figures told us subscription models had been tried before and that reader-funded local journalism wasn’t possible. Those people were wrong.

As well as The Mill in Manchester and The Tribune in Sheffield, we now have titles in Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and London, and across the company we now employ more than 20 people. It’s not too bold a claim to make to say that we’re changing the face of local news.

Thanks to your support, we’ve been able to grow. While for the first two years, The Tribune was basically just me, we now have three members of staff and a small office at Leah’s Yard in the city centre. Adding new members of staff has massively increased the breadth and depth of our output. Victoria is a dogged investigative journalist, happiest when delving through financial records and going after dodgy employers and companies. Some of her greatest hits in the last year include this one about the London tech bros who came to Sheffield to set up a terrible housing coop, and this one about the mini museum which turned into a massive fiasco. Daniel Timms wears a number of hats, but Tribune readers will know him best as the brains behind brilliant data stories such as this one about where your recycling goes and insightful policy pieces like this one about the age-old Meadowhall vs the city centre debate.

Your support also means we have been able to commission more great freelancers this year. David Bocking’s pieces on the environment have long been reader favourites, but we now have Carey Davies as well, who this year wrote a beautiful, lyrical piece about millstone grit, the rock on which Sheffield was built. Other regular freelancers include top music journalist Daniel Dylan Wray and culture writer Holly Williams. And a personal favourite of mine was our piece by rail expert Gareth Dennis where he singlehandedly redesigned the entire South Yorkshire transport system. Maybe 2025 will be the year his vision finally comes true. Maybe not.

All of which is to say that four years in, The Tribune is very different to the title I set up in 2021. For the first few years, it was a question of survival. Now, we’re established as one of the major serious news sources in Sheffield and count most of the movers and shakers in the city among our 30,000 readers. 

But we don’t want to rest on our laurels. We want to set our sights still higher. In our office at Leah’s Yard, there are four desks, but we currently have only three members of staff. If we had one wish for 2025, it would be to fill that fourth desk with another full-time reporter. Employing another journalist would allow Victoria to devote more time to the major investigations that hold power to account and produce material changes in the city, and I would be able to get out and about meeting more of the people who make Sheffield such a fascinating place to live.

However, in order to do that, we need more members. Having 2,504 paid subscribers is amazing and more than I ever thought possible when I started The Tribune. But we’ve always said we will only grow our team when it’s sustainable to do so. The next big milestone is 3,000. If we reach that in 2025, we can start thinking about hiring another journalist and filling that fourth desk.

That’s what’s in it for us, but what about you? First and foremost, for just £8.95 a month or £89 for a full year (the equivalent of just £1.71 a week), members get four editions of The Tribune packed with original journalism and great stories sent direct to their email inbox every week. Members are always telling us that our stories help them feel more connected to the city in which they live, and how much they value being able to chat with other members in our vibrant comment sections.

But you’ll also be doing something much more than that. You’ll be making an investment in the future of Sheffield. The idea that Joshi and I had for The Tribune in January 2021 was that people not only wanted but also deserved better than what they were being given by traditional local newspapers; that local journalism did have a future beyond endless celebrity clickbait and wall-to-wall ads. So far, more than 2,500 of you have bought into that idea. If you want to join them, and help high-quality journalism grow and thrive in Sheffield, hit the button below.

Many thanks, and Happy New Year.

Dan Hayes
Founder, The Tribune