Dear readers – I hope you’re having a lovely weekend.
In December, I sat in Abbeydale Ballroom’s lovely new downstairs bar and met some of our Tribune members for the first time. I’d only been living in Sheffield for three months at that point, and it was great to receive such a warm welcome from our community of readers.
There were lots of questions from attendees, and many of them centred around how these stories came our way. How does a reporter sitting in an office in Leah’s Yard end up with the information that can reveal a London lawyer is threatening hundreds of leaseholders in Sandygate and Dore with high court action if they don’t hand over tens of thousands of pounds?
The answer is our readers. It was a message from a Tribune reader that led me and Daniel down a rabbit hole of auctioned-off freeholds, bullied leaseholders and regulatory body inaction. It’s one of the biggest stories we’ve ever published and it’s thanks to our community of readers that we were able to bring this story to light, which has now been raised in parliament and resulted in South Yorkshire Police making initial enquiries.
I’ve spent most of the past two weeks chatting to readers who responded to our survey, and have been told about our world-class chamber music scene, a partnership between women in Sheffield and Palestine, underpaid taxi drivers and disappearing tech companies.
It’s quite a different approach to traditional media — which often presents news as something that they provide as if it has descended from on high. But our relationship with our readers is very much two-way. We get so much value from our that relationship: not just tips for future stories, but also feedback on how we’re doing and how we can improve, context about the city that we may not know and recommendations for people we should speak to and places we should visit. It’s also thanks to our readers' suggestions that I’ve found a great weekly yoga class, a new sauna spot and plenty of restaurants to try.
I don’t think this kind of community comes about as the result of a happy accident, but as a result of our fans having faith in us and supporting our optimistic mission to try out a new way of doing local journalism. It’s come from a group of people saying: I like what these guys publish, I value what they’re doing, and I want to pay for it and read more of it and be part of it.
If you’re not yet committed to a paid subscription, I’d be very grateful if you’d take that step today. It means joining a community who believe that local journalism should be shaped by readers and journalists working together, not by reporters sitting in a newsroom on Fleet Street reading a press release on a screen. It means having a real say in how your local area is covered.
There are lots of things in this chaotic and polarised world that you cannot control and in which it feels like you have no meaningful stake. But you do have a stake in this.
If you got this far, thanks so much for reading. It’s currently only £8.95 a month to join us – less than a couple of pints at the pub. Why not just try it for a month? Your liver will thank you for it. Or if you’ve read us for a while and know that, deep down, we’re good sorts really, why not save even more and get a full year’s subscription: twelve months for the price of ten.
Before I came to Sheffield, I lived in Manchester. It was great, but it was often hard to feel part of a community. It’s the sort of place people come and go a lot, with lots of tall skyscrapers and busy roads. But in just a few months here, I’ve already felt like the city has welcomed me.
I’ve felt that with new friends and my housemates, but most of all from Tribune members, who have been so supportive to me since I’ve joined. “Welcome to Sheffield… You'll love it,” said one reader on my first piece, and that’s pretty much summed it up since I’ve been here. If that’s the kind of community you’d like to be a part of, then join us today.
Mollie, Staff Writer, The Tribune
