The new Glasgow-focused title from local newsletter start-up Mill Media will be named The Bell, Press Gazette can reveal.
The new title will begin to publish on Monday (30 September), initially without a paywall, and aims to release new content three times a week.
As previously reported by Press Gazette The Bell is staffed by two full-time employees: former Novara Media contributing editor Moya Lothian-McLean and former freelance Robbie Armstrong.
They will be supported by Glaswegian writer Ophira Gottlieb, who already writes for Mill Media, and former Slate managing editor June Thomas who edit some stories and share her expertise with the team.
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Stories have already been commissioned from Scottish journalists including freelances Dani Garavelli and Catriona Stewart, and Holyrood magazine writer Margaret Taylor.
The Bell will be Mill Media’s first new launch away from Substack, the newsletter platform on which the venture originally started in Manchester in 2020.
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The Bell, as well as an as-yet unnamed sister title in London, are both launching on rival platform Ghost, where they are set to be joined by Mill Media’s four other titles, which also cover Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham, before the end of the year.
Mill Media to Glaswegians: ‘Give us a Bell’
Mill Media uses a paid subscription model and promises readers longer, deeper reads on their communities.
“Glasgow seems to be staring at its past, wondering where it is in the present and trying to reimagine a new future,” Armstrong said.
Lothian-McLean said The Bell wants “to tell the story of everyday people in Glasgow and reflect back at them a city that they recognise but might not see always portrayed in the media that they consume”.
The pair said upcoming stories will cover the city’s “fascination with bingo halls”, the last urban ferry on the River Clyde and “our uneasy relationship with Brutalism and high-rise flats”, adding that longer investigations will look at issues arising from events like the 2014 art school fire.
The publication’s name is inspired by the bell that appears in the city’s coat of arms and in the legend of Saint Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. Armstrong said it also alludes to an esteemed Irish literary journal of the same name. The brand’s logo aims to evoke the style of Glaswegian Art Nouveau architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Lothian-McLean said the pair plan to distribute tip cards around the city inviting Glaswegians to “give us a Bell”.
“We want to be out there talking to as many people as possible all the time,” she said.
“In a lot of modern journalism jobs you’ve got these amazing reporters who want to give their time to stories and they want the resources to do it… The luxury of time, and the luxury of resources, are much more scant than they were in the past, and that’s due to the shrinking landscape of journalism. We’re not only in a position, hopefully now, to do that ourselves, we’re also in a position where we can work with those journalists in Glasgow.”
Glasgow is not a news desert, already boasting titles including the Glasgow Times and Scottish national paper The Herald.
Armstrong said: “We don’t want to detract from what’s already going on in Glasgow. But we feel the approach that The Mill takes is a little bit different.”
[Read more: Scottish local news coverage mapped – All districts have at least one outlet]
Lothian-McLean added: “Any thriving city should have a thriving media landscape. The Bell isn’t there to try and compete in the same way – it wants to be part of Glasgow’s media landscape, and we’re just one seed in, repopulating, replanting what it used to have.”
Whereas Armstrong has spent almost half his life in Glasgow, Lothian-McLean moved to the city for her role at The Bell. She said she was “working with someone who knows it like the back of their hand, so I’m there as fresh eyes.
“I think that’s a good combination – you’ve got someone who’s so versed in a city and then you’ve got someone who can notice new things about a city that might seem so standard to people who live there.”
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