Welcome to The Raikes Journal
The Raikes Journal CIC is Gloucestershire’s leading independent business news website, featuring stories about education, training providers & charities.
Raikes is a digital magazine and community interest company (CIC) dedicated to delivering engaging, original, clickbait-free, quality local journalism about Gloucestershire. No listicles, no pop-ups, no advertorial, no allegiances to political paymasters.
We’re the only independent editorially-led operation in Gloucestershire edited by a journalist. Our focus is the business, charity, education and training sectors, but we’ll cover any story we think is of interest.
And 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’re built on 25-years plus of experience covering the county and beyond. We believe local journalism matters. Our aim is to build a sustainable digital magazine for the county that is credible, holds authority to account, runs on more than just recycled press releases, speaks to its community and helps build relationships and networks.
Raikes is funded by paying subscribers, who can see beyond the paywalls on our email editions and newsletters, and our Founding Partners and Founding Members.
Membership… why The Raikes Journal should be part of your marketing… how much it all costs…
You can social media your own stories all you like, but there is nothing more powerful when it comes to being found online as also having an independent, trusted, credible, third party website writing about you. Hardly anyone will ever click through from social media to your website.
With the advent of our new ‘best friend’, AI (artificial intelligence), only two out of 10 internet searches now result in someone clicking on a link to a traditional website now. AI priories data from trusted third party sites first, and delivers that as its answer to internet searches.
If you want your business to be found more through online you should consider a special relationship with The Raikes Journall It’s the only independent, trusted, third party, journalistically-led business news platform in Gloucestershire, and that’s why AI likes us so much.
AI also loves LinkedIn. If we run your story on one or our editions, we predict you’ll have between 700 and 1,000 pairs of eyes on it through Raikes and a very conservative minimum of 1,000 more pairs of eyes via LinkedIn. That’s not how many followers we publish to on LinkedIn (we have close to 12,000 connections), that’s how many impressions you’ll get. Although you can usually double that last figure.
We rarely clock less than 2,000 impressions per post. That’s not counting shares or re-posts. That means if we run your story on one of our editions more than 2,000 people will see it, possibly 3,000-plus. We’ve touched as many as 10,000 for one edition.
If anyone else, and I mean anyone - nationally or locally - says they can beat that, ask them to show you the figures.
If you want you press releases featured on The Raikes Journal consistently you need to have a special relationship with us. We published the very best press releases that catch our eye in our PR wire channel and versions of them on our email editions linking through to the channel. And if we really like the story, we’ll turn it into a news story and it might become a main lead story.
A special relationship means if you are a business, you need to become a Founding Member (£275 annually - just over £5 a week) and if you’re an individual (£120 annually - £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once). You support us, we’ll support you. The more who join up, the greater the reach, the greater the network.
Everything you read is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People, our sponsors, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
Readers who upgrade to become a paid subscriber become part of this CIC too. And we’ll love you for that. It helps make us sustainable, allows you to see past the paywalls, comment on our stories, and know you’re making possible the county’s only editorially-led digital magazine dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire about its businesses, charities, education and training sectors.
Raikes is the only independent website approved to use the BBC’s local Government copy. It recognises Raikes as independent journalism.
Other commercial opportunities in more detail…
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 or our Cyber channel.
Become a Founding Member - simply overpay your annual membership. Pledge £275 or more and we’ll also promise to write about you too.
Become a Founding Partner. You basically become a shareholder in the operation for the duration of your partnership. This is about a relationship - a partnership with you. Everything 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…’.
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.
Help us to correct any mistakes (we try very hard not to make any, of course!): 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.
On the eve of our second year we are clocking closing in on 1,000 subscribers and currently clock 12,000 page views a month. When you consider a page is often a whole edition, which can contain six stories or more - you can multiply that figure by the 12,000 page views, if you like, to get how many views stories really get.
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.
As the big custodians of our local news outlets have overseen their demise in the last 20 years news deserts have spread across the UK, and Gloucestershire is no different.
No one holds our local authorities to account, press releases are regularly circulated as news, posts created by artificial intelligence abound and community erodes.
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, somewhere to park up, take stock, read something considered and enjoy the moment, welcome to The Raikes Journal.
(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 still 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?
