Jim Waterson’s London Centric has grown to 5,500 paid subscribers and more than 42,000 free subscribers since launching in September 2024.
This equates to around between £300,000 and £400,000 a year in annual revenue (depending on whether readers are paying the discounted introductory rate).
The newsletter now has a three-person full-time team including Waterson, who is editor, with staff paid getting “in line with or better than what a lot of nationals pay”.
The former Guardian media editor launched London Centric using his voluntary redundancy payment from the newspaper where he spent more than six years. He was previously political editor at Buzzfeed News.
London Centric covers politics, transport, housing, crime, cultural institutions and life in the UK capital.
It is the UK’s biggest paid-for local newsletter on Substack and is listed eighth among all Substack newsletters with the most UK paying subscribers. It was shortlisted for Innovation of the Year at the British Journalism Awards in 2025.
London Centric’s growth has come without any spend on marketing, said Waterson, who believes its success comes from hunting down stories that people “hadn’t even considered”.
“It turns out that if you delight people with big investigations and scoops that tell them something they didn’t know about the city they live in, they’re willing to pay, and they’re not willing to pay for generic empty coverage where they can feel that effort wasn’t put into it,” Waterson told Press Gazette.
Standout stories
One of London Centric’s standout stories has been its piece on Harry Potter-themed gift shops evading tax, which then led to a wider investigation spanning two years.
“That has got treasury ministers involved. That has prompted raids on some of those shops across central London,” said Waterson, who has also given evidence in the House of Commons on the subject.
Other notable stories have included reporting on injuries caused by faulty Lime bikes, “which brought the phrase ‘Lime bike leg’ to the attention of the masses”, and a piece on illegal ice cream vans that was shortlisted for the Local Journalism award at the British Journalism Awards in 2025.
Waterson said the model is “remarkably simple” – to find stories readers are actually interested in, rather than what journalists think they should be interested in or AI-generated clickbait.
“We’ll go out and find something that people hadn’t even considered or answer a question that was on their brain every day, but they hadn’t even thought of reading about,” he said.
London Centric identifies these stories through the large number of tips it receives through Whatsapp.
“Almost all of the best stories now come from readers directly getting in touch,” said Waterson. “My Whatsapp number is in the middle of every piece. I get 20 or 30 tips a day that could be national stories.”
The newsletter is sent two or three times a week, and “every single [story] has to be an eight or nine out of ten, or even better, a ten-out-of-ten quality edition,” said Waterson.
Subscription costs unchanged
London Centric’s subscription prices have remained unchanged since launch: readers pay around £6 a month or £60 a year for the first year, rising to £7.95 per month or £79.50 a year thereafter.
Around 95% of revenue comes from paid subscriptions, but the publisher also gets some revenue from syndicating stories for publication elsewhere and a tiny amount from Youtube and Tiktok. Substack works on a revenue-share model, taking a 10% commission on subscriptions.
London Centric has not spent money on marketing, shareholders’ returns or middle management, Waterson said, with an aim to reinvest money into its journalism and staffing.
“We’ve grown to 5,500 just through word of mouth, and I think the challenge is if we’ve got there through word of mouth, how much further can we go if we actually did now – after two years – start to put an actual plan in place?”
The team comprises Waterson, full-time reporter Polly Smythe who was hired in October 2025 and head of growth David Hall, hired in July 2026. The publication also uses regular freelance contributors.
“Pay in general is in line with or better than what a lot of nationals pay… where there is a cost that can be cut, I cut it and then I try and put the rest into staffing,” said Waterson.
“I have watched enough Dragon’s Den to know that diversifying your revenue is a good idea occasionally,” he added. “Down the line, I’m trying to think what else we could do. We’ve played around with video and had enormous reach on Tiktok and Instagram, and abysmal earnings.”
While London Centric does not currently carry any advertising, he added that “nothing’s off the table, but I don’t want to break the trust with audiences”.
London Centric as local add-on subscription
Waterson said he believes that beyond its quality stories, London Centric’s growth can also be attributed to its filling a “gap in the market” and covering more London-specific stories that national newspapers are reluctant to cover out of fear of overwhelming non-London readers.
“That means thinking about stories that might be in one corner of London but have relevance to another, and that attracts an interesting bunch,” said Waterson.
He added that he sees London Centric as being for readers that already have a subscription to The Times or Financial Times, but London Centric is their local add-on with “the quality and standards of a national newspaper”.
Though the “raw numbers” in terms of readership of stories will be smaller than what Waterson was seeing with his pieces at The Guardian, he said the impact of them is felt more clearly with newspaper editors, politicians, lawyers and city workers among those subscribing.
He said: “I’m having way more impact and way more fun than I ever did at a national.”
Waterson added that part of the fun is “going out myself in person and doing the door knocks and confronting someone powerful doing something that they shouldn’t be”.
Video doesn’t translate to paid subs
London Centric has also grown its audience on social media over the last two years. Its Instagram account has reached around 95,000 followers in six months, while its Youtube account has almost 3,000 subscribers and more than 350,000 total views.
London Centric started filming story explainers in March after “getting fed up with random teenagers reading out our stories and getting a million views”.
“I’m interested in the mass communication opportunity of video without that becoming a distraction,” said Waterson.
“We had an experiment over the summer where we did a lot of video, and it brought in an interesting new audience. And it certainly brought in a lot of awareness of the brand, but it didn’t necessarily read across to new paid subscribers.
“You can do a video that does three million views, and you can think you’re really clever, but it’s just the thing that people are flicking past. Whereas if you bring in someone who’s willing to pay and commit to your publication, that’s a solid base to keep doing the good journalism from.”
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