Welcome to The Raikes Journal
Thank you for visiting The Raikes Journal. Raikes is a digital magazine and community interest company dedicated to delivering engaging, original, clickbait-free, quality local journalism about Gloucestershire.
We have a particular focus on its business, charity, education and training sectors, but will cover any story we think is of interest.
We’re funded entirely by our treasured partners and paid-for subscribers, and send our email editions - our news briefing notes, long reads and local recommendations - at least three times a week. Monday’s is always free to all, but Thursday and Friday’s big story is often paywalled for the benefit of our members. It’s how we generate our revenue.
All you need to do to start receiving your free editions is to sign up to our free mailing list below.
You’ll find Raikes is a different digital platform to any other in Gloucestershire. We are journalistically and editorially-led and focus on quality rather than quantity. We do not to publish every press release that falls in our lap, 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.
For those familiar with the maelstrom of information flaying 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, welcome to Raikes.
Subscribing is either free - everyone receives three email journals a week - or paid for.
If you upgrade to paid, you’ll be able 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, and you’ll be able to comment on our stories. 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 those things are important, 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.
More on membership
You can subscribe to Raikes for free. Just use your email address.
Or you can become a paid-up member. You can sign up for just £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once.
If you have already subscribed, please do share news of what we are doing and encourage others to join you!
If you really like what we are trying to do for the county, and really believe in independent journalism for your community, you can go even further and become one of our treasured Founding Members, by pledging £250 or more (or more than our usual annual subscription of £120). As well as our gratitude you will be firmly on our radar - you’ll also get a short story and an annual subscription!
Think of paying for that subscription like crowdfunding or ‘paying it forward’. You are not just buying a service, you are making everything Raikes does possible and helping us achieve our ultimate goal - to help build a community website shaped by community.
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 feel safe to say that other platforms may substantially bigger email databases, but our Monday edition is 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.
So please do subscribe, tell your friends, and join us and our growing community of readers to get our original articles, news, views, expert insight pieces and learn even more about our incredible county - all delivered straight to your inbox.
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 as I moved further and further away from journalism the pull become too much and 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 a surviving pioneer of the dawn of the digital age, 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, publishers 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.
I’ve seen the local news that helped thread our communities together and told our stories, recorded our deeds and held our authorities to account, fragment and disappear thanks to a race to the bottom by big corporations and real journalism begin to drift from memory. That trend continues.
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 imagery, unchecked facts and roundly accepted quotes from well-meaning released posted as news. It’s an alternative to the torrent of press releases that pass as ‘news’, 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.
Crucading aside, the object is simple. To create a credible, engaging website that the county’s business leaders want to read, feel comfortable being interviewd by, and which represents Gloucestershire how you would like to see it represented.
(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.
