Dave Hill: There’s lots of London news about, and it’s getting better

Will I miss the daily Evening Standard newspaper? Not much. I don’t commute, was never interested by its showbiz pages and didn’t need its national news. And I can still get the stuff I want from it online, where I was mostly getting it from anyway.

The Standard has been slashing jobs, and that’s not good. Yet in some ways it has improved: its website is better-looking than it was, I’m hopeful for its forthcoming reincarnation as a weekly – the magazine background of editor Dylan Jones will surely help – and this year’s mayoral election saw it, by and large, take the even-handed approach it should always have taken in the past, but rarely did. Its past abuse of its monopoly position reached a pathetic peak when it was placed at the service of Boris Johnson’s political ambitions by a handful of his media cronies. Some legacy.

That said, even at its worst the Standard has had some excellent reporters. I hope my current favourites don’t disappear. One of them has told me that no longer needing to produce copy for both a printed product and a website could make it easier to strengthen the latter – another possible reason to be cheerful.

There are more. BBC London News endures, not without its own struggles against cuts, but its output is still top drawer. ITV’s equally polished London wing is still with us too. From the web, MyLondon sends out a daily stream of stories, local and regional, many of them supplied by journalists funded by the BBC-backed Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), created to make up for the shrinkage or demise of local newspapers in general as business models have collapsed.

The LDRS also helps to sustain the Standard and a range of sub-regional or borough-focused titles, some of them part of my regular diet, such as the Enfield Dispatch and the Hackney Citizen. Residents of Camden have been supporting the Camden New Journal since 1982. Newspapers, paid-for or free, still exist across the capital, as do online versions of them and website-only publications. They are diverse, diffuse, variable and sometimes emaciated shadows of former selves, but the simple point is that reports of the death of London journalism sometimes have misleading headlines.

There are newcomers concerned with the city as a whole. The Greater London Project, a Substack operation run by Joe Hill, policy director of think tank Reform, in collaboration with Adam Smith Institute research director Sam Bowman, has been going since July, publishing pieces by various authors in the cause of “celebrating the things that make London great, and working to make it even greater”. As you might expect, they are concern with large policy ideas – cleaning the Thames, building new neighbourhoods, how to make Crossrail 2 happen.

Just back from its holidays, The London Spy  has been going for over a year, with a mixture of long-form inquiries, round-ups and “weird stuff” (its words). There are probably others I’ve yet to find. And coming soon are new online ventures, expected later in the autumn.

Joshi Hermann, whose The Mill has thrived in Manchester and spread its approach to Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham, will launch a London operation with a staff of three and a feature-led output of “narrative journalism”, much of it already commissioned. Speaking to me from Manchester, he marvels about the huge number of journalists London contains, many of them rendered dormant by lay-offs and the evaporation of freelance budgets. There were, he says, some 270 applicants for those three London jobs.

More recently, Jim Waterson has left the Guardian, where he was media editor, and announced London Centric, describing it as “a modern news outlet for the capital doing journalism in the old-fashioned way”. Spurred to act by the end of the dead-tree Standard, he will start out on Substack and perhaps later expand to other platforms. He tells me he hopes to generate talking points and debate, drawing wider media interest. London Centric – clue in title – promises to provide “all-London journalism” about “who really runs” the place.

All of this is to the good. In a city of nine million people there must be a demand for an array of journalism about the city and its infinite variety of activities, issues and lives, with different outlets complementing each other more than they compete for the same narrow space – and, most important of all, for London news, analysis and comment that strives to be fair, accurate and devoted to enhancing readers’ understand of what goes on here, rather than feeding prejudices or confecting product for the outrage market.

The website you are reading was set up by me in a much simpler form the day after my final freelance contract as the Guardian’s self-publishing London commentator – the best job in my trade I’d ever had – expired at the end of January 2017. I was neither alone in being jettisoned, nor surprised: self-employed contributors are the usual soft-target victims of the savings axe and, on top of that, it was becoming clear to me that my approach to writing about London had fallen foul of a reductive, left-populist groupthink within the paper’s big departments, from opinion to news to (even) sport.

I started On London in order to provide an antidote to that sort of thing, to continue writing about the much-maligned, misrepresented and misunderstood city, its politics, development and culture, in the way I wanted to – and to create a space where kindred spirits, rich in expertise and good at writing too, could do the same. Seven-and-a-half years on, my media empire remains one of the planet’s smallest, run solely by me from one very untidy room in my house in Hackney. But it’s still going and the number of people who support it keeps inching up. London needs more dedicated London journalism. And it’s getting it.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

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