What comes next?

Dear Londoners — happy Sunday from your favourite editorial team. We hope you’re having a great weekend and that you’re getting to bask in this glorious sunshine in your nearest park (or beer garden). If you’re new here, let us introduce ourselves: Hannah (editor), Miles and Andrew (staff writers). 

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker published a story about a new wave of publications springing up in the capital. Entirely online and mostly newsletter-based, these small publications are looking to fill the void left by the demise of the Evening Standard, whose billionaire owner made the decision to end its daily print publication last year. The headline was blunt, unsparing: “London Is a Local News Desert. What Comes Next?” Part of the answer, the article suggested, was us: The Londoner.

To some extent, the Standard’s demise is the story of bad decisions made by individuals, of mismanagement and infighting and cost-cutting. But their model — free to read but ad-reliant — was fundamentally broken. If you’ve been with us for a little while, you’ll know we’re doing things differently: ad-free articles, and an emphasis on quality, rather than quantity. Buzzy and glamorous, serious and in-depth, we take you through the keyhole for an insider look at one of the richest, most diverse and most important cities on the planet.

Instead of trying to hit as many eyeballs on as many topics as possible, we’re focused on growing a loyal, discerning group of readers; people who really get what we’re trying to achieve in our city. The pile-’em-high, more-clicks-the-better attitude is in decline. And in its place is a focus on prioritising the reader — on bringing them the stories that really matter. “‘I think [London] is just such a deeply interesting, varied, really fucking strange city… there’s a certain kind of kinesis about it,’” Hannah said in the New Yorker piece. Doesn’t it deserve a media that treats it as such?

You can see how that model plays out in our recent coverage. Over the past couple of months, we’ve covered everything from the capital’s hot new literary nights to the new plans for Soho’s nightlife scene; from the lonely death of an NHS doctor pushed to the brink to the behind-the-scenes drama of Clapton FC; from the £45 million contract awarded to the firm that gave the mayor Taylor Swift tickets to a tour of the hidden convent that lies just off Oxford Street. We also released our first culture edition, a top-to-toe rundown of the best art and entertainment the city has to offer (we'll be bringing you more of these kinds of editions soon).

The sole reason we can do this kind of journalism is because we’re funded by our paying members. We need to write what they want to read: articles that are exciting, intriguing, unexpected — stories about the city they couldn’t read anywhere else. Without them, we’d have no choice but to join the race to the bottom: clickbait pieces on celebrity plastic surgery or barely rewritten press releases. In the current media landscape, there are only two options: paid-for quality news, or free low-grade news. The only way to fight back against the latter — to send a message to the billionaires, tech moguls and private equity companies stripping London’s media to the bone — is for enough people to get behind the alternative. Put simply, it's all down to you.

If you’re receiving this email, it's because you haven’t yet made that decision to become a paying member. We get it: paying for a local media subscription isn’t something everyone can prioritise financially. There’s a reason The Londoner puts out 50% of its pieces for free: we want to remain accessible to all of our readers. That’s never going to change. 

What that means, however, is that the 400 or so people who pay are subsidising the 9,000 odd who don’t. Those readers are the financial backers that allow us to do what we’re doing. We're asking you to join them. 

We’ve had a 20% off deal across our subscriptions for a couple of months now. The reason for that is simple: we want to thank our early backers for getting behind us. We realise we’re asking you to take a risk, putting a bit of money behind a fledgling team with a slightly mad dream of bringing good quality local journalism back to London. So if you become one of our early backers, we’re offering that 20% off forever — i.e. you will always get us more cheaply, as an eternal gesture of thanks for your faith in us.

But we can’t run deals like this forever. We launched our paying memberships in January and, at the end of April, we’ll be switching the deal off and reverting to full price. So this is your one and only chance to get in the door as one of our early backers — and, most importantly, to gain bragging rights for supporting The Londoner right at the very start of its journey. Join quickly, and you’ll be forever known as one of the first 500 visionaries.

In the six months or so that we’ve been running, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’ve started to reshape journalism across both the capital and the country as a whole. It’s long overdue. But we need to keep pushing forward, and we’d love you to join us — at a discount.