Get in touch
Email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk. No matter what your story is, we will handle it with care and the utmost discretion. Our aim is to champion Gloucestershire, and if a story is worth telling.... we will take it on.
Welcome to The Raikes Journal
Thank you for visiting The Raikes Journal - a digital magazine and community interest company (CIC) dedicated to delivering engaging, original, clickbait-free, quality local journalism about Gloucestershire.
We are the only independent news operation covering the county approved to use content delivered by the BBC’s local government reporting service too.
We have a particular focus on its business, charity, education and training sectors, but will cover any story we think is of interest.
The Raikes Journal was launched to create a credible, engaging digital email magazone that tells the stories from those sectors, and that the leaders of those sectors - and those interested in the county - want to read.
We speak to our community, understand what is really happening, give you some context and give a voice to those who would otherwise be crowded out.
We like to think of ourselves as the only journalistically and editorially-led, independent, Gloucestershire-focused operation in the county.
Raikes is funded entirely by our treasured partners and paid-for subscribers, and our growing army of Founding Members - companies who pay a subscription to support us and hire our services to cover their events and stories.
If you want copy writen by a journalist on a credible platform that you can share across yoru social media channels and use on your own websites, then please think of us.
We send our email editions - featuring our news briefing notes, long reads and local recommendations - at least three times a week.
And we also publish other stories too, not least those in our Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series in our Reports and Deals channel, sponsored by Randall & Payne.
Monday’s email edition is always free to all, but Thursday and Friday’s big story is often part-paywalled for the benefit of our members - and to help generate the venue to make us sustainable.
For those familiar with the maelstrom of information flying past on social media (just go on LinkedIn for two minutes and see what we mean), those who want something a bit more considered, surrounded by a bit less noise, slower paced but still pertinent, smewhere to park up, take stock, read something considered and enjoy the moment, welcome to The Raikes Journal.
All you need to do to start receiving your free editions is to sign up to our free mailing list below. Just use your email address. Or you can sign up to receive your two extra editions a week and see past all our paywalls for just £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once. Or go all in and become one of our Founding Partners or Founding Members!
Founding Members overpay the annual subscription to the tune of £250-plus. Doing that not only helps make possible what we do, but gives you a special working relationship with Raikes, putting you firmly on our radar when it comes to stories you want us to cover. You just need to let us know.
Upgrading to paid will also enable you to see past the paywalls on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You’ll be able to comment on our stories too.
Most of all, you’ll be helping make sustainable this community interest company, with its particular focus on businesses, charities and education and training providers.
If you think how Gloucestershire is presented is important, and if you think journalism is important and you want it to remain the county, clickbait free - original well-written stories, not recycled press releases, or puff, able to challenge authority if needed, to hold people to account, that can tell your stories, that can stand up for your community - then please do support us.
You will be supporting independent journalism in Gloucestershire.
To hire our services as a reporter please email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk to find out more.
Help us to correct our mistakes: If you have a complaint about something we have published, please follow our complaints procedure.
The Raikes Journal name is trademarked and owned by us.
Subscribers - free or otherwise - are crucial to Raikes becoming sustainable, but we already have 12,000-plus social media connections in Gloucestershire to help us along.
And you can see some of the comments we’re getting, embedded in this page we’re already having an impact.
Just six months into our relaunch we already felt safe to say that other platforms may wield substantially bigger email databases, but our Monday edition was already read by more people than any other business news story sent out on any other newsletter from any other digital platform in Gloucestershire covering similar content.
We like to think our readers wants to be associated with Raikes because it is a trusted and credible. A year in (February 2025) and Raikes was regularly achieving 10,000-plus views a month and has more than 750-plus subscribers and growing. If that continues it will become the biggest operation of its kind in Gloucestershire.
Please do help us achieve that by subscribing, telling your friends, and joining us and our growing community of readers. We’ll be incredible grateful and we’ll send you our editions with our original articles, news, views, expert insight pieces and you will learn even more about our incredible county.
Commercial opportunities
While everything we do is editorially-led (we do not run advertorials, like some ‘news’ websites) you can talk to us about subjects, themes, issues, profiles you may want use to cover as one-off articles or as part of a series in which you or your firm can be involved or placed centre stage. We can also run expert insight articles written by you or a member of your team, as well as comment pieces. And we are open to Saturday big read articles about any subject you wish to discuss - business or otherwise.
Sponsor our Reports & Deals channel, which hosts our Top 100 series (this is currently taken by Randall & Payne) or our Cyber channel.
Become a Founding Members - simply overpay your annual membership. Pledge £250 or more and we’ll also promise to write about you too.
Become a Founding Partner from £2,500. You basically become a shareholder in the operation for the duration of your partnership. This is about a relationship - a partnership with you. Everthing remains editorially-led, but we can use our resources to support you. The deal is to be discussed to suit you. For example, four feature/lead-length stories - each featured on a newsletter - plus four mini articles/or event preview/mini-biog with an image - each also featured on a newsletter edition with a link. Plus an introductory article. Partners are credited on almost every story we publish, with a link to their website. We think of you first for comment for our editorials and are open to your story ideas. You will also get a first-look at the opportunities for our planned magazine.
Advertise on our email editions. We don’t run annoying pop-ups, but send us your best image and short news story/event/charity fundraiser etc and we’ll run it, clearly marked ‘Today’s edition is sponsored by…’.
To find out more about some of the opportunities we mentioned above please email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
The people behind The Raikes Journal
The Raikes Journal was founded by me, long-standing Gloucestershire journalist Andrew Merrell, at the start of the UK’s Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It made such an impact another platform paid me to close it down and work for it. But after consulting with businesses in the county to make sure I hadn’t completely misread the tealeaves, I relaunched it at the start of 2024.
I am the architect and editor of the first dedicated business news websites for Gloucestershire, Bristol, the West and South West, editor of numerous magazines covering the same content, as well as lifestyle and sport and publisher of the county’s first podcasts and email newsletters. I’ve seen the rush to social media ahead and witnessed a decoupling from depth and meaning in content towards the marketing first approach that floods our media social streams.
I’ve seen how local news can help thread our communities together by telling our stories, recording our deeds and holding our authorities to account and I’ve seen it fragment and disappear in the race to the bottom led by big media corporations. As a result real journalism first begin to drift from memory and disappear almost completely.
Raikes was born to remind people the part real journalism can play, as a place of calm and reason in the social-media swarm of soundbites and endless imagery shouting for our attention, the unchecked facts and unquestioned accepted quotes from well-meaning released posted as news.
It’s an alternative to the torrent of press releases and marketing, articles about out-of-county celebrities and TV programmes, exaggerated weather stories and listicles. We won’t just point a phone camera at a story, let someone talk and call it reporting.
(We do value those many great press releases too and they inspire some of our best ideas, but we post the pick separately on Raikes in our PR Wire channel - so please do them them our way!).
A little history for those who stil haven’t had enough of reading!
As with that first iteration of Raikes (born to support Gloucestershire’s businesses, training, education and charity sectors through the pandemic), what you are now reading was made possible thanks to the generous backing of the Gloucestershire businesses who wanted a platform that supports their community and does it justice.
Raikes posted its first story on 9 April 2020 as Gloucestershire and the UK became swamped by the pandemic. It was the same day its namesake, Robert Raikes, published the first ever Gloucester Journal newspaper (also 9 April - but in his case back in 1722 And he didn’t have a pandemic to contend with!).
The Raikes Journal was immediately taken to the hearts of many, and after its first four weeks it already had more than 7,200 individual visitors and a growing number subscribing to its newsletter.
In Gloucestershire we have more than 2,500 county-based charities. Many need the help of businesses more than ever before, and not just financial support. The skills, experience and know-how within the ranks of companies is worth its weight in gold to charities and volunteering groups and is key to helping these often small, resource-poor organisations become resilient and sustainable.
And we know businesses are increasingly conscious of their importance to their communities. They know they can be incredible forces for good - if only they can make those connections. Raikes exists to help make that happen by introducing everyone through its stories and weekly journals.
Our journals will also recommend local events, keep you up to date with what’s happening in Gloucestershire as well as report on, investigate, and tell the many stories about businesses, the business community, charities, colleges, universities training providers, apprenticeships, crucial county news and feature the pick of social media posts we spot. We are in no rush to be first to publish because we put quality first.
Raikes is about finding and sharing those incredible stories all of us carry. Which is also our way of asking you to whisper those ideas in our ear please!
Why the name 'Raikes'?
The short answer, is ‘we had to call it something’!
But we wanted a name that was embedded in Gloucestershire and recognised our own deep-rooted connections. Raikes is a reference to Robert Raikes (both of them - senior and junior).
Before everyone gets even more confused, the father and son were famous residents of Gloucester. In 1722 Raikes senior founded and ran what became The Gloucester Journal newspaper (from where we took the ‘Journal’ name of our own title).
Raikes very possibly invented the phrase ‘freedom of the press’ and certainly helped lay down some of the key tenets of journalism as his newspaper sought to report on the issues around business and how democracy worked (or didn’t) at the time.
Mr Raikes was a major supporter of the Sunday School movement that helped educate the children of the working people for whom school was not even a dream. Some say it is this ability to read and write, and the good journalism they read afterwards, that educated them about their county and helped spark a social revolution.
Oh, and we also liked this idea… that the word ‘Raikes’ is apparently old English for ‘people who live on the sides of hills and valleys of these isles’. Remind you of anyone?
Get in touch
Email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk. No matter what your story is, we will handle it with care and the utmost discretion. Our aim is to champion Gloucestershire, but if a story is worth telling.... we will take it on.
Help us to correct our mistakes: If you have a complaint about something we have published, please follow our complaints procedure.
The Raikes Journal name is trademarked and owned by us.
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
If you subscribe and refer friends to The Raike Journal you’ll earn rewards towards complimentary membership (three referrals will get you one month, 10 will get you three months and 25 will win you six months).
Or you can pay for a subscription, which works out at which will allow you to see past our paywalls - which fall on almost all our copys after two weeks - plus you’ll be helping us deliver some real community journalism for Gloucestershire.
