Dear readers,
You catch us in an excited mood — we’ve just learned we made the final shortlist for Private Eye’s Paul Foot Award, one of the UK’s most prestigious journalism awards. Our bombshell investigation into Andrew Milne made the cut alongside some truly fantastic reporting from all over the UK, which means we’ll be heading down to London in a few weeks to meet Ian Hislop and the gang. Please keep your fingers crossed for us!
But as excited as we are, we’re not sending you this email just to toot our own horn. We’ve got a shortlist of our own to share with you today — the final list of our pledges to improve this city.
A month or so ago, we sent out a newsletter entitled: “Can you help make Sheffield better?” As we explained then, we were compiling a list of promises we could make, and we wanted your input on the best places to put our energy. You didn’t let us down: over 650 of you responded, offering lots of feedback on our ideas and putting in some of your own.
Quite a few of you wrote that you don’t want this new campaign to distract us from the kind of reporting that saw us commended by Private Eye, which we’ve definitely taken on board. As a result, we’ve focused on pledges that directly relate to the work we’re already doing, while simultaneously making Sheffield a better place.
Several team meetings later, we think we have them. As we’re celebrating five years of The Tribune, we’re making five pledges to the city. We will commit to them if we can get another 1,000 members during our campaign. We know, that’s a mad goal. But we also know that Sheffield has backed us before, time and again — so this is no moment to be unambitious.
Here they are:
The first one was by far the most popular: Tackle disinformation among young people. As journalists, we’re working on the frontline of discerning what is real, and what isn’t — a task AI is making that much harder. We’ve already had some teachers get in touch to say they’d love us to come into school and speak to the students about how to sort fact from fiction. If we hit our thousand, we’ll do it.
The second emerged after a bit of discussion: nurture local talent with a new writers’ programme. The UK’s media is London-based to an almost surreal degree, which makes it much harder for people in Sheffield to have their voice heard. We’ve already given some writers their first byline but, if we hit the target, we’ll make this a formal programme. Every two months, we’ll open a call for pitches from new writers (including, but not limited to, local journalism students) and pick the strongest idea. Then we’ll work with that writer to get the piece published and pay them a proper rate for the story. (We’ll also give feedback on all unsuccessful entries to help writers improve.)
Our third pledge would be to shine a light on the good stuff, with a monthly Good News Edition. We know that the news can skew negative, which can lead to a general sense of dismay at the state of the world, in part because outrage is attention-grabbing. So we want to give some hope. We’ll feature a Sheffielder of the month who is doing amazing work in their community, as well as spotlighting great local businesses and venues, which we know readers love to hear about.
Number four would be to commission a special series of articles exploring Sheffield’s inequalities. Everyone knows that Sheffield isn’t a level playing field for everyone that lives here. We’d identify an academic who could partner with us on articles that explore who is missing out in today’s Sheffield and why. It’s the kind of work we hope will be useful for the new council as they decide what to prioritise in the year ahead.
And speaking of the council, our fifth pledge is to engage citizens with local democracy, producing a monthly round-up of the key meetings and decisions taken in the council chamber and at the combined authority. We’ll make this totally free to read so that everyone, no matter their financial circumstances, can understand what’s happening in local politics. We’ve just had a set of rather shocking elections — now the dust has settled, citizens need to know what their council is doing.
We hope that’s got you excited! But if we’re going to do it, we’ll need our one thousand new members. So here’s how it’s going to work…
Next Thursday, we’ll be launching our campaign at our fifth birthday party in Leah’s Yard (still a few tickets here). We’ll also be dishing out lots of copies of our exclusive print newspaper, which we’re putting the finishing touches to now. If you can’t make it, don’t worry — in the following weeks we’ll hand out lots of papers at locations across the city. If you’d like to volunteer to help us getting the paper out, then please get in touch.
We’re then going to be offering new members a one-off “pay what you feel” deal for two months: either full price, half price, or if you’re really not sure about us yet, no price at all! Alongside that, we’ll be giving our website a big makeover, with a tracker at the top so you can see how we’re doing. And you may even spot the odd Tribune logo out in the wild…
Then we’ll have just one month to get 1,000 new members. All hands to the pump. Every contribution, shared post, and new member counts.
We’re really excited, and hope you are too. More details to come next week!
