“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance”

Two years ago, in the spring of 2024, we launched The Ilkley Journal. Our mission was to offer a better alternative to local news, the kind that has increasingly come to be shaped by algorithms, ads and the attention economy (and all powered by AI and an endless deluge of short-form video content).

Our philosophy was simple. We wanted to take our time to write well and at length about everything and anything that people in Ilkley and the surrounding areas would find interesting, entertaining and informative – stories that better captured the first rough draft of local history, stories that went much deeper.

In our humble opinion, we got off to a very good start with a lengthy feature on the mayoral race in West Yorkshire. If memory serves me right, it took around a month to research, interview and write up. All of this work was done pre-launch, meaning we could launch The Ilkley Journal in a way that immediately demonstrated the kind of local journalism that would set us apart from other local news providers.

What we hadn’t quite figured out was how we would do that consistently on an absolute shoestring budget with very little recent journalistic know-how in a small corner of West Yorkshire. And lo and behold, we soon realised that, as a tiny, one-man side hustle, sustaining this level of quality would always be a financial and logistical challenge.

While there wasn’t a eureka moment, it was intuitively clear that we had to pivot, somewhat, from our desire to be an exclusively long-form hyperlocal newspaper as we figured out how to get there eventually.

So we introduced roundups. It meant we could begin building our presence online more systematically while also providing some value and differentiation to readers as we worked on the kind of long-form stories that we ultimately wanted to invest in.

Since then, this approach has come to define the shape and feel of The Ilkley Journal and it has worked – up to a point. We’ve grown our readership and reach, generated revenue month after month, made our name known and, importantly, regularly produced high-quality long-form local journalism.

But it’s never been properly sustainable and we’re still very much a labour of love. Simply put, we don’t generate enough revenue from our supporters to invest in the kind of journalism we want to be known for.

We could have invested in advertising, but even then, this wouldn’t have worked or brought in enough cash. Littering our site with irritating, irrelevant advertising never made sense. Plus, seeing as we truly believe that reader-powered journalism is one of the best ways to fund local news – bolstered by other forms of revenue, too, like higher quality ads (there’s a way of doing this well), events and merchandise – it’s become clear that there are limits to what we can achieve as The Ilkley Journal.

The numbers, in short, don’t add up – and it’s why, as we’ve evolved over the past two years, our coverage has naturally shifted away from focusing more on what’s happening in and around the town to reporting more widely on the district of Bradford, the constituency of Keighley and Ilkley and the West Yorkshire region.

The idea of local, after all, is multilayered. You just have to look at the way devolution is changing the very nature of local government, with combined authorities taking on more powers – and away from Westminster – while also transforming the way that local authorities look after their sphere of responsibility.

Even then, this hasn’t cut through quite in the way we would have liked it to have. The challenge has been that while we’ve been a local newspaper throughout our very short history, we’ve still been seen as a hyperlocal publication. And that means so long as we’re known as The Ilkley Journal, every other corner of the district of Bradford was always going to be out of our reach.

It’s taken us some time to figure this out but as we’ve got closer to our two-year anniversary, the idea of a reset and a rebrand has come to shape our thinking about how we best deliver on our mission going forward. So, as we noted in our goodbye, we have wound down our operations at The Ilkley Journal. But this isn’t the end of our story, merely the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

So, it’s our pleasure to announce the launch of The West Yorkshire Journal (or The Journal for short). The name is new, but our mission remains the same: to deliver a slower, longer and better version of local news across Bradford and the wider West Yorkshire region.

Because it matters. The written word, long-form journalism, critical thinking, reading, writing stories for people (and not algorithms), holding power to account, inspiring positive change, the fourth estate, facts – the world needs it now more than ever.

But we can’t do it alone. Good quality journalism costs money to produce – it really is as simple as that – and, as we noted above, we believe that the best way of backing the independent production of local news is through readers.

To help us do just that – to fix, fund and future-proof our work – please do consider signing up as a paid supporter below. And if you’re not quite ready to jump in right now, no worries at all, you can also sign up for free. We hope to convince you one day that our journalism is worth paying for.

Thank you and onwards we go – the best is yet to come.

Yours editorially,

Nindy, editor and founder

*Headline is a quote attributed to Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)