The Glasgow Bell’s local news model

As local news organizations struggle with shrinking staffs, declining advertising revenue and the relentless pressure to chase clicks, The Glasgow Bell is taking a different approach. The subscriber-funded digital publication is betting that readers will pay for ambitious, deeply reported journalism about the places where they live. Local editor Calum Grewar spoke with Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau about why he left larger media organizations for local journalism, how The Bell balances investigations with lighter community coverage, the advantages of operating within a wider network, and why he believes there is still a sustainable future for local news.

What brought you to local journalism, and what made The Bell the right place for you to do it?

This wasn’t my first job in journalism. I started at a very small documentary company in London just after finishing my master’s in journalism there, doing research during COVID.

I left London when I got a job at BBC Scotland. That brought me back to Glasgow. I grew up in Scotland, so it was a really nice homecoming. But BBC Scotland isn’t entirely local—it’s national within Scotland.

I was doing investigative documentaries for a while. Like a lot of early careers at the BBC, there were fixed-term contracts: investigative documentaries for six months, arts radio for another six. You move around and around, and it can be hard in big broadcasters to really forge a path if you’re not identified as talent early on. I was certainly feeling that way.

Then a job came up at The Glasgow Bell. I was only aware of it because a couple of articles had made a bit of a splash by talking about cultural issues that traditional media wasn’t touching. One, for example, looked at whether the gentrification of part of the city could be embodied by one particularly controversial bakery.

That was one of the pieces through which I’d really heard about The Bell. I thought it was interesting, so I applied. I took a small pay cut to join because I could immediately tell that the autonomy we’d have and the issues we’d cover would be innovative. It was a new thing. Instead of the sense of decline you can sometimes feel in legacy organizations, this was the opposite: an innovative model.

I’m really happy with the decision.

How would you describe The Bell’s model to somebody who only knows the traditional local newspaper model?

We are one of seven local online publications. You can think of it as a newsletter, although we also have a fully functioning website that serves as the main landing page for the publication.

It started in Manchester during COVID, when the CEO and editor-in-chief began sending a newsletter of local stories to his friends. It slowly grew, and eventually he thought, “People seem to really love this. I’m doing in-depth, quality news, but focusing locally.”

That’s the sort of local journalism that has disappeared as big conglomerates have increasingly looked for clicks. You can’t really go in depth if you’re chasing clicks. So the thinking was: Maybe people will pay to have quality journalism applied to their neighborhood.

Eventually it grew. The Manchester publication has now been going for about five or six years, and then they opened in Sheffield. Those two publications, I believe, are profitable, which is quite an achievement. The wider organization now employs almost 30 journalists.

It’s subscriber-funded. People pay monthly, and we publish between three and five times a week. The Glasgow publication is coming up on two years old now, and it’s going really well. The growth is positive, and people are very receptive.

So the subscriber offering is a couple of newsletters or articles each week?

We combine them. On Monday, we do a briefing that summarizes local news. Each story might run from a paragraph to three paragraphs.

We try to make it original because there’s a big emphasis on being on-the-ground locals doing reporting. We’re not recycling press releases. If that’s the kind of story that is in the news, we’ll go out and try to add our own reporting: “This is what is really happening.”

Then we have reviews, recommendations, local chit-chat, sometimes gossip and jokes. That adds to the sense that we’re here—we’re reporters in the neighborhood. A big part of what we do, and why it’s becoming more successful, is creating that sense of community. We’re part of Glasgow.

Then, midweek, we’ll do a more traditional hard-news story. That will usually be a minimum of 1,200 words and can go up to 3,000. That is a level of commitment and reporting that hasn’t really been seen in local news in Scotland for quite a while, certainly not in Glasgow.

Then we do a weekend read, which tends to be a bit lighter, usually a feature. So it’s a nice mix of in-depth hard news, often including investigations, and lighter community coverage. Local investigations have basically disappeared from a lot of local news in the U.K.

Do you cover things like schools, community issues and politics at the local level?

Yes. It’s funny because I think that question reflects a kind of prejudice—and I’m not saying you have it. I probably had it myself when I was studying journalism.

I certainly went into journalism thinking, “I’m going to be doing U.K.-level news, and hopefully beyond U.K.-level news.” You imagine politics, the people making the big decisions, big business and so on.

I’ve actually become quite bored with a lot of that news because so many people cover it in the same way and say the same sorts of things.

I’m genuinely not just saying this because I represent a local publication: I’ve been blown away by the richness, diversity and drama you can find in local stories if you just look.

Greater Glasgow is approaching 2 million people, depending on where you draw the boundaries. It’s big, but it isn’t New York or Los Angeles. Yet I’m convinced that if we hired three more reporters—there are three of us working on it now—we would never run out of genuinely exciting stories packed with quirkiness and drama.

The better we do, the more of those stories we unearth, and they often filter up into mainstream coverage.

As a parent, I also think about how impactful what happens at a local school or in local government can be, yet those issues are often barely covered.

I’ve got a great example of that. We do a lot of school coverage because parents obviously care a lot about schools. Those stories are widely read, and they’re important.

There was a private school in the south of Glasgow, quite an elite private school, that announced in January that it was going to close.

There was some media coverage that essentially repeated what the school had said: that it had come under financial strain. The charity regulator was also investigating the directors over issues relating to the school’s administration.

We thought, “There’s probably something else going on here,” because the two guys running it had children at the school and were prominent local businessmen who ran an ice cream and pizza company.

So we dug around and found this really interesting history of another wealthy parent who had loaned the school £2 million to keep it going. There had also been accusations about how well it had been run.

Fast-forward to June: It shuts with virtually no notice because a liquidator comes in, discovers the school has no insurance and cancels the children’s fun day. There are kids in tears.

Because we had gone in depth and contacted teachers and parents, we were able to go to the school and cover its complete collapse. Dozens of teachers were made redundant, weren’t going to receive redundancy pay and wouldn’t receive their June wages. That was really important coverage from their point of view.

It was also incredibly colorful because we were there. And on top of that, there was a wider context in U.K. politics around increased VAT on private-school fees and how that was affecting private schools.

By following this one school very closely, we were able to provide a strong on-the-ground example of the impact of a national policy.

You mentioned that you have a subscription model. Is it primarily the reporting that makes people value the publication enough to subscribe? How do you persuade people to pay?

It’s something we’re always figuring out. Our managing editor has a good saying: “Win respect, but lols win hearts.”

We’re always trying to mix it up. That school story, for example, got us quite a few subscribers. Maybe that was partially because private-school parents tend to be better off and might be more likely to pay. You can be cynical about these things.

But one of the stories that performed best for us was our ranking of Glasgow’s bakeries, which under no definition comes close to hard journalism.

People subscribe for different reasons, and we need to reach as many different people as possible.

Investigations can have a negative connotation, and not everybody wants to hear only negative things about the place they live. So positive, quirky and lighter stories are also really popular. We try to cover as many different types of stories as possible.

Do you find there’s a tension between covering a story aggressively and not alienating readers or subscribers? Does the subscription model ever make you reluctant to dig as deeply into a controversial issue?

Not really. I don’t think we’ve had a story yet that has cost us subscribers. We’ve covered controversial topics that have produced blowback, but that doesn’t deter us from doing it.

Most of the time in modern journalism, the people who shout the loudest tend to be a minority anyway. When there is pushback, the overall response is usually positive. People are pleased that somebody locally is making the effort to get stuck into certain issues.

I think the broader risk is the overall narrative you create about the city. A lot of investigations are negative. How much do you uncover before people start associating your publication with doom and bad news about a place they love?

We’re not there yet, and I don’t think we will get there because people still appreciate the reporting. But we’re always trying to find that balance. We love Glasgow. We want to talk up Glasgow and be Glasgow cheerleaders while also maintaining the journalistic cynicism you need.

You mentioned wanting to have a few more reporters on staff. What resources or infrastructure do independent local newsrooms lack when they try to undertake serious investigative work?

There are really only two other local titles that directly claim to cover Glasgow, and their journalists are tasked with producing five or six stories a day. The three of us, by comparison, focus on about three or four stories a week.

I know they’re very jealous of that, because what journalist wouldn’t want that extra time?

Time is obviously the main resource.

Some of our most popular stories are also quite nuanced and don’t necessarily provide the headline you initially thought they would. They may not produce that really attention-grabbing angle.

Because we’ve built a reputation for going in depth, people are okay with that. They’ll still read the story and subscribe. Other publications might not believe they can get the clicks needed to make that kind of story worthwhile.

Reach PLC, one of the U.K.’s largest publishers and the owner of a lot of local press, has announced that it is moving away from clicks at all costs and reinvesting in quality news. That has attracted both fanfare and criticism.

I do think the success of organizations like ours has been one of the motivating factors behind that.

We hear so much about the attention economy and the fight for clicks. Do you really think that’s beginning to turn around if a company like Reach is moving in this direction? Your subscription model presumably makes you less dependent on SEO and clicks.

SEO still helps because our big challenge is awareness. If I meet someone on the street in Glasgow and ask whether they’ve heard of us, they probably haven’t yet. Some have—I’ve bumped into people who know us—but Glasgow is a fairly big place.

There are a lot of eyeballs to get in front of, so reach matters.

Reach PLC’s change will be really interesting to watch. I think they’ll probably put more material behind a paywall because organizations like ours have shown that if you produce quality journalism about issues and places people care about, they will pay for it.

Do I really believe the industry is changing? We’ll see.

It’s working for us at the moment. We are on a path toward financial sustainability, and I think Glasgow is crying out for this sort of news.

Do you think being physically on the ground and embedded in Glasgow gives you an advantage if larger publishers begin putting more local reporting behind paywalls and competing for subscribers?

Yes, I do. I hadn’t really thought about them competing with us in that way, because we’ve made the local approach our unique selling proposition. They’re probably not going to fully play our game.

I don’t think it will be a massive issue in the medium term. Who knows in the long term?

What does “community” mean for The Bell? You’re covering an entire city, and Glasgow is obviously made up of very different communities. How do you make sure that breadth is reflected in your coverage?

Glasgow is a very proud working-class city, and class is a massive issue in the U.K. It’s very political. When you cover certain issues and areas, you have to be sensitive.

You have to involve the people who live there. You have to listen and devote time to those issues.

There are some subjects we’ve covered that I’m genuinely proud of because we’ve been able to cover them sensitively without being timid.

We’ve started tracking which parts of the area we’ve covered, and one of the semi-regular types of stories we do is to focus on a place that is almost never mentioned in the news. We go there and see what people are talking about.

People like that kind of story.

There’s an area not too far from here with what looks like a wasteland of a park that’s almost completely abandoned. But if you go there, you find this alternative society of young teenagers who maintain dirt bikes and have built semi-permanent dens.

It’s great because it flips the narrative around an area that has had a pretty torrid reputation for the last 30 or 40 years.

We try to get everywhere, although it’s impossible to get everywhere.

We also commission freelancers, and that’s something we want to do more of. If someone has specific expertise or access to communities or areas we want to report on, we’ll try to bring them in to write. That helps.

And to go back to what I said about the private school and the idea that those parents might be more likely to pay: There’s a perception that only middle-class people and above will pay for journalism.

But there’s a publication called The Digger, which has been going in North Glasgow since around 2000. It reports almost exclusively on crime in the area, from organized crime right down to speeding offenses and charges. It costs about £2 a week, roughly comparable to our monthly subscription on an ongoing basis, and it has provided its editor with a living for about 25 years.

People of all classes will pay for news they care about in their area.

The Bell is locally focused but belongs to a wider media network. What are the benefits of combining local editorial knowledge with the shared organizational infrastructure of a larger company?

We’ve had a lot of conversations about how we tailor our strategy locally and contribute to the wider strategy.

Across the seven cities with publications in the network, each has a different flavor that reflects the readership of that city. We have different feels and different coverage.

The main advantage is being able to draw on shared resources. There’s central editorial help and an investigations editor, for example. We wouldn’t be able to have that resource just on our own in Glasgow—not yet, at least. That is a big plus.

Obviously, especially with the whole Scotland-England dynamic, we think a lot about how much central editors should be involved in local coverage. But everyone is open-minded and respectful, and they’re extremely skilled. Overall, the shared resources are very useful.

Does the shared infrastructure also take a lot of operational work off your plate?

Massively. It’s a huge time-saver.

There’s an operations manager, and in Manchester they’ve hired someone who handles events and social media.

Talking about community, each of the titles tries to do at least a couple of events a year. Sometimes you discuss local issues; sometimes it’s more of a celebration. It helps create this idea that we’re all locals, we all care about Glasgow and we’re happy to contribute to this publication.

There are people who can help with that side of things, as well as basic infrastructure such as the software we use to publish on the web. There are always bugs, and I’m not a coder, so that support is a massive help.

Although we operate independently editorially, The Bell benefits from having a somewhat centralized management team.

That’s a story I’ve heard repeatedly: Smaller local publications can provide news that communities aren’t getting elsewhere, but one way they make it sustainable is by gaining scale through a network. That sounds similar to what you’re doing.

Yes, I think so. As you say, it’s the operational work that would otherwise drain a massive amount of resources.

Looking three years ahead, what would you like The Bell to be doing that it can’t do now?

The obvious answer is more staff.

There are three of us now. I think Glasgow easily justifies six full-time reporters with different specialties and interests, ideally from different backgrounds so they have access to different communities.

That’s number one. At that point, your in-depth coverage of the city becomes almost comprehensive, and the publication becomes must-read material for residents.

The other big thing would be events.

Some of the events we’ve done have been wildly oversubscribed. People are desperate for constructive opportunities to vent criticism and have discussions.

We got the council leader to come to our last event, and she isn’t known for making a lot of public appearances. I think that shows we’re creating an environment where people feel they can come and have proper discussions.

It was robust, don’t get me wrong, but it was a proper discussion where people felt their voices were heard.

We don’t really have the town hall tradition you have in the United States, and I almost see what we’re doing as something like that.

The bigger we become, the more influence we’ll have and the more frequently we can hold events. I think people in Glasgow genuinely want to see the city improve.

Before I let you go, Calum, is there anything we haven’t touched on that you think is important for our readers to know?

Just check us out.

Some of the stories are free to read. They’re not all paywalled. Some are behind the paywall and some aren’t, including for public-interest reasons.

I imagine a lot of your readers are interested in journalism as an industry. I do think what Mill Media and The Bell are doing could be rolled out elsewhere.

Who knows where the company will be in five years? Maybe it’ll be stateside. I don’t know. There are huge opportunities here.

One of the things that has been motivating for me is the contrast between the atmosphere at places like the BBC, where there are huge cuts and redundancies, and being somewhere that is growing and moving toward sustainability.

So I’d just say: Have faith—and check it out.