The difference you’re making

Earlier this month, I took a two week holiday. As well as spending some time visiting family back home in Bolton, I also travelled to Berlin and Kraków. Both cities are a fascinating blend of the old and the new, and while I love beautiful old churches, the modernist architecture of the old Eastern Bloc is endlessly interesting to me.

Nothing so extraordinary about going on holiday, you might think — but you’d be wrong. It’s actually the first time I’ve taken that much time off in the three and a half years since launching The Tribune.

Being a founder of something is a great privilege. There’s nothing like the excitement of watching the thing you took a crazy risk for grow and develop. When I see the amount of support we have in this city, I feel a level of pride I didn’t know before. I definitely see my adult life as dividing into two eras, “Before Tribune” and “After Tribune”.

But good grief, is it tiring, especially on your own. Readers deserve regular updates and that means a relentless publishing schedule. As soon as one story is done the next one starts. Sometimes a story you’re pursuing turns out to be a dead end and you’re left scrabbling for something to fill the gap. I’m not asking for sympathy — I love my job — but there are easier lives I could have chosen.

The thing about staying permanently busy is that it becomes hard to stop. So when my boss pointed out that I had really quite a lot of annual leave left to take this year, I began to contemplate the seemingly impossible. Could I, in fact, take a whole two weeks off? (Before then I’d only managed to take a week, and even then it was a rarity).

The fact I could is thanks to something really special that we’ve built in Sheffield. The early days, when it was just me, were wonderful but tough — and probably unsustainable in the long run. I hadn’t pulled so many all-nighters since my student days, and twenty-odd years on, my body is considerably less forgiving.

But now things look different. You’ll all know Victoria, our excellent staff writer, who has done a great job over the last two weeks at keeping the show on the road. Then we’ve got Daniel Timms, who helps with editing part time here. And we’ve also built up a list of great freelancers like regular contributors Holly Williams and Daniel Dylan Wray.

During my two weeks off, we published some really great stuff, like this fascinating read from David Bocking about the red deer rut, or Victoria’s conversation starter about Newfield School. Yes, I continued to obsessively read every dispatch from Tribune towers from Checkpoint Charlie and Kraków’s beautiful Old City. But with each one, I relaxed a little bit more. Things weren’t falling apart. And this week I returned to my desk, feeling genuinely rested.

That’s because, while we’re still small, we’re not as small as we were. Thanks to the generosity and support of Tribune members we’re actually building something sustainable, big enough to make a difference. We’ve even got our own little newsroom now, and with it, what feels like a settled place in the life of this city. 

Those who know me will know that I’m not given to grandiose pronouncements — understatement is more my usual style. But, and maybe it’s the lingering holiday vibes talking, this time I’ll say it. What we’re building is a movement. A movement for Sheffield news that is both deeply researched, and beautifully written. Thank you for believing in it.

But I didn’t just want to look back in this update, but forward. I really see the mission of The Tribune as only partly accomplished. Here are a few numbers to make it concrete.

We currently have almost 29,000 people on our mailing list. Even allowing for a few people not in the city being on our list, that’s roughly 5% of the total population of Sheffield. That’s not at all to be sniffed at — and shows we are having serious heft in shaping the city’s conversation. 

What about paying members? There we have almost 2,400 — or roughly 0.4% of the city’s population. These are the hero citizens who think Sheffield needs better news and have backed us to do it.

Those numbers are good — but I know we can go further.

So here’s a medium term ambition for The Tribune: to have 10% of all Sheffielders receiving our e-mails, and 1% supporting us financially. That would mean more or less doubling the size of both of our lists — to have over 50,000 people reading us, and over 5,000 people paying to support.

Why am I pursuing these, admittedly somewhat arbitrary, targets? Because while I love where The Tribune has got to, I can see how much more it can be. We don’t just want enough resource to allow each of us to go on holiday from time to time. We want to be able to thoroughly cover all aspects of the city’s life, in a way that isn’t possible with our current small team.

We want to spend more time out and about, picking up tips in pubs and attending all the key council meetings and court cases. I’m proud that we unearth some of the big stories in our city — like our vital piece about the rapid growth of Green Bridge Community Housing this week. But others slip through the net, because there’s just not enough of us. That’s frustrating, and makes me more determined than ever to grow what we’re doing.

Almost all of our funding to do that comes from our members. We don’t get any grants. We get a little bit of advertising revenue, but it’s only a couple of per cent of the total. And actually, that’s the best way. If we’re funded by Sheffielders, then that’s who we’re accountable to.

I’m sending this out to everyone. So firstly, let me say thank you to all of you, and especially those who have signed up as paying members. You’ve allowed this crazy dream to roll on for over three years. If you’d like to know how else you can support, a really big thing is spreading the word — by word of mouth, social media, whatever. The more readers, the more impact our journalism can have.

And secondly, I’d like to invite those of you who just get our free e-mails to become signed-up backers. This is a journey; we’re only part of the way there, and to get there we need more people on the bus. It’s all possible because of ordinary Sheffielders who think our city needs proper journalism. Join them — and us — and we can make it happen.