Two upmarket London news start-ups are finding a growing (albeit small so far) market for paid online news about the UK capital.
Meanwhile a third, more ambitious, title – London Daily Digital – has launched with 18 staff based on Fleet Street looking for advertising and event sponsorship to fund its daily digital and monthly print edition.
All this activity in London follows the closure of the Evening Standard’s daily print edition in summer 2024 with the loss of around 70 staff, as well as the steady erosion of London’s network of weekly newspapers covering the various boroughs.
London Centric was launched in September by former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson and offers readers regular email newsletters and in-depth reporting that they won’t find elsewhere. Based on Substack, it charges £7.95 per month for full access.
The Londoner was launched by Mill Media in October with a full-time staff of three. The title hopes to replicate the success of sister publications in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield and has around 8,000 paying subscribers across those cities.
Like London Centric, it is a newsletter-style model offering more in-depth coverage that readers might expect from the capital’s various free-to-air websites. It charges £8 per month for full access.
The capital’s newest launch, London Daily Digital, began publishing in mid-February 2025 and is offering a paid-for monthly print edition for £5 and a free daily page-turning digital edition as well as a website. It offers readers generally upbeat coverage centred around council initiatives across the 32 London boroughs.
London Centric appears to have taken an early lead in terms of revenue when looking at the three London news start-ups.
It has 18,000 subscribers getting free updates on Substack and Waterson told Press Gazette that paying subscribers are already in the “thousands” suggesting gross revenue in excess of £100,000 per year.
London Centric aims for news people ‘actually enjoy’ reading
Waterson recalls being asked to look at the issue of news gaps around the UK during his six years as media editor of The Guardian.
“I kept coming back to saying it’s London that’s the problem. London has these big gaps and it’s really patchy.
“If you go to Camden, you’ve got the Camden New Journal still doing things properly, still breaking news, still talking to people and getting the pulse of the community. And then you can go to some other of the 32 London boroughs and there can be absolutely nothing. I’ve encountered press officers who don’t really seem to have had a call from a journalist in months at some of the places.
“So my idea with London Centric was not to supplant the excellent hyperlocals that keep popping up in some places or even the borough-wide papers, but to focus on slightly top-down, pan-London coverage and dip into areas when it’s relevant across the whole place.”
Asked what he makes of the existing London news scene, he said: “I’ve made my enemies of [Standard owner] Lord Lebedev enough times and he’s sworn at me on Twitter enough times. I don’t think there’s any love lost between the two of us there. But you know, The Standard still has some brilliant reporters.
“They do some great stuff there, but there is the lack of ability to go off diary sometimes for them because they have to cover the full waterfront. The broadcasters just inevitably don’t tend to have the ability to go off diary because they’ve got to get new pictures every day.”
Waterson said he has been amazed at the way stories broken on London Centric have spread out into the “ecosystem” with broadcasters and every national newspaper picking up his stories.
London Centric aims to produce a big story every couple of days with investigations ranging from the toll apparently taken by Lime rental bikes on Londoners’ limbs to the sudden appearance of Harry Potter-themed gift shops across central London.
Asked what he looks for in a story, Waterson said: “My main target is to get people to pay to subscribe and to actually enjoy reading it. It shouldn’t be boring and it shouldn’t be tedious or worthy ‘eat your greens’ journalism, but it should just tell you interesting new things about the city.
“Some of the best stories have literally just come from cycling around London, stopping at things and going yeah, but what is the deal with that? Why is it that Westminster Bridge is just full of scammers? I can see the HQ of the police and the Parliament building there and it’s still just full of illegal stuff in front of me. What is the deal with that?
“And going beyond just a single column or post, but getting completely obsessive. Westminster Bridge led me to literally walking into an empty ice cream depot in South London and trying to find out who the illegal ice cream van operators were and them telling me to get the hell off their premises. That the sort of time and effort – each of these pieces is taking weeks of reporting.”
Waterson said he is both optimistic but also realistic when it comes to the future prospects for journalism.
“I think we’re entering the end game for a lot of the older ad-supported models. And I don’t see how, when AI-generated rubbish is everywhere, that Reach employing people to rewrite 13 different versions of the same story on different websites is going to make economic sense…
“I think some places are going to have to die before we can rebirth something that looks a bit more like where audiences actually are.”
The Londoner has a team of three reporters and “a decent budget” for freelance pitches. It is approaching 10,000 email subscribers and has paid readers in the hundreds, having only launched subscriptions a few weeks ago.
Big hits for it have included an investigation into an unsafe children’s home in a building owned by a Labour MP and a story about London mayor Sadiq Khan receiving freebie Taylor Swift tickets.
‘There is a lot of London journalism and a lot of it is very good’
London-wide websites reaching a mass audience include the Standard, BBC London and Reach-owned My London.
Dave Hill has been writing online news for London since 2008 when he was given a blog by The Guardian. Eight years later he was a victim of cutbacks and in 2017 he launched his own website – On London – providing an independent view of politics, development and culture in England’s capital city.
He pays himself what he describes as a small wage, as well as a network of contributors, thanks to readers who pay £50 per year to keep the site free for everyone. In return they get exclusive email content and an invite to his annual Christmas party.
Asked for his view on the state of London journalism he said: “People have been saying for years how weird it is that London only has one newspaper, and why isn’t there an equivalent of the New York Times Metro section?
“I think there is a lot of London journalism about and a lot of it is very good.”
He said larger sites such as My London and BBC London do good service journalism about London and cited Ian Visits and Greenwich Wire among some of the best independent news websites covering the city.
As for the business side of his own site, he said: “My subscriber numbers are more than they have ever been before. Because I’m quite old and I don’t have a mortgage I can afford to run a site that pays me a small wage and pays a decent amount to contributors.
“I’m permanently knackered but I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
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