Dear Londoners: welcome to your new quality newspaper. If you haven’t already — and really, what is stopping you — please join our free mailing list for must-read stories about London in your inbox several times a week.
The plan
We’re going to capture life in the capital in all its drama and glory. While we’ll cover a dizzying array of topics commensurate with the sheer breadth of London, the red thread running through our stories will be the stuff that tends to get skimpy coverage elsewhere.
Instead of a play review, we'll detail the clash of personalities behind that theatre that keeps pulling shows; instead of an exhaustive blow-by-blow recounting of the day at Westminster, we’ll delve into a single line in a council report which is set to change what time you get kicked out of the bars in Soho. Our stories will take you to the best parties and tell you which landlords to avoid. The Londoner is here to deliver a form of journalism that is compelling, revelatory and, above all, fun.
If London is one capital of English-language journalism, New York is another. But in recent decades, New York has been light years ahead of this city in terms of local coverage. It’s hard to think of magazines and newspapers here that dedicate similar resources to delving into the city’s darkest corners, as well as providing lighter fare: what people are wearing, eating and talking about behind closed doors.
We think London deserves this sort of scrutiny – and entertainment. We hope The Londoner can provide stories that will help people living here to feel more connected to the thousands of London-based realities that the reader may not encounter in their daily lives.
We will be funded primarily by readers via paid memberships, a model that has been a great success for our Mill Media stablemates, who all publish a mix of free and paywalled journalism. We'll announce when we are turning on paid subscriptions soon. But for now, please join our free mailing list and share our site with friends. Want to help us out even more? If you know a great London-specific story that no-one is talking about, please get in touch.
The team
We’re led by former Evening Standard feature writer Joshi Herrmann, who is the founder of our parent company Mill Media. Our staff writers are Hannah Williams, who has written for the New Yorker and the Guardian, Miles Ellingham, who used to work for the Financial Times, and Andrew Kersley, who has broken big scoops for the Observer and the Sunday Times.
If you join our mailing list, you will get all of our journalism in your inbox, so there’s no need to click on any spammy links or second-guess "clickbait" headlines. Several times a week, we will send you a great story that we've been working on, which could be about anything from a scoop about a new development to an op-ed about the visual art scene.
We'll start your week by sending you a Monday Briefing, containing our recommendations for the week ahead, a list of things we think you should book before they sell out and some interesting headlines and analysis about the capital that are worth knowing about too.
Trying to make sense of a city of 9 million people and 600-odd square miles is no small task. The question which animates us is: what is this city really like today? The Londoner is an attempt to get to the bottom of that. We hope you’ll join us as we do our best to answer it.
