Former Washington Post managing editor Cameron Barr hopes to help “restore and revive investigative accountability” with a new role at Manchester-based Mill Media.
Barr has been named investigations editor in an appointment that the publisher said “signals our ambition to become a leading centre of investigative journalism in the UK”.
Founder Joshi Herrmann first launched subscriptions-based The Mill in Manchester in 2020. Mill Media now also runs The Tribune in Sheffield, The Post in Liverpool, The Dispatch in Birmingham, The Bell in Glasgow and The Londoner in the capital.
The publisher currently has 21 staff, with more hires to be made shortly, and just over 11,000 paying subscribers.
Barr, who is now based in the Lake District, will be working with journalists across all six titles.
He plans to spend around three days a week working with Mill Media, alongside commitments for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and other writing projects.
He told Press Gazette that “Joshi and his team are really solving one of the most important and perplexing conundrums facing the media industry everywhere – but what I know best is the US and the UK – and that is how to preserve and strengthen and grow really serious journalism at the local level.
“Joshi has placed a great deal of emphasis on investigative reporting and on good writing and the product that Mill Media is producing in all of its cities is really impressive in terms of the sheer quality of journalism that’s coming out multiple times a week in each of the cities.
“And I think that’s really the most exciting thing: is to be able to, in some cases, restore and revive the kind of investigative accountability, tough minded, rigorous reporting that that we all need…
“We need journalism that exposes the machinations of powerful individuals, whether they’re developers or other types of business people or government officials in these really important cities in England and Scotland.”
Barr worked at The Washington Post for 19 years, and was appointed managing editor for news and features in 2015. During his time there he oversaw teams that won 13 Pulitzer Prizes.
His previous roles included national editor, national security editor and Middle East editor and he was also formerly foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor for a decade reporting from Jerusalem and Tokyo.
He left his staff role in 2023 but continued doing consulting work for the paper. He decided to end his association with the title earlier this year when proprietor Jeff Bezos said its opinion section would focus on voices that support “personal liberties and free markets”.
Barr wrote on Linkedin at the time that this was “an unacceptable erosion of its commitment to publishing a healthy diversity of opinion and argument”.
The title has also been cutting staff numbers through voluntary buyouts – affecting at least 60 journalists this year – and layoffs, with around 100 employees laid off in January.
Barr told Press Gazette that aside from helping to strengthen investigative local reporting “the other thing that’s also very exciting is that Mill Media is a growing enterprise”.
Today (Thursday 4 September) Mill Media has begun advertising for staff writer roles on The Mill and The Dispatch, with further hires planned before the end of the year to bolster both staff writer roles and regular contributors in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and London.
The publisher has also just closed an advert for its first head of growth with a goal to “get our brands and our journalism in front of whole new audiences, innovate in how we add readers to our community and stop at nothing to make sure Mill Media becomes a major provider of high quality journalism in the most important UK cities”.
Herrmann said: “Cameron is well known among journalists as one of the most impressive editors around, and as soon as I found out that he was living in the UK, I gave him a call and tried to persuade him to join us.
“Having someone of his skill and experience working with our writers will make a massive difference as we try to build on our record of publishing genuinely groundbreaking reporting.
“We all know that local journalism has been starved of the resources to do investigative work, so to have a figure like Cameron entering the fray is extremely exciting.”
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