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. 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, from its courts to boardrooms, from its council chambers to those major investments, deals, takeovers, mergers, award wins, company collapses and more.
We believe local journalism matters. Our aim is to build a sustainable digital magazine for the county that is credible, that holds authority to account, that runs on more than just recycled press releases, that actually speaks to its community and has a relationship with it and helps it connect.
We believe stories drive reputation, develop communities and good journalism on an independent, credible platform is key to achieving that.
And if you believe in the power of that too, care about how our county and its business community is represented, care about telling its stories, then please join us.
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.
If you join as a free-subscriber that’s a vote of confidence in what we do, but if you are a business and you want your story told, want to get our attention when you have something to say, please do consider becoming one of our Founding Partners, Founding Members, sponsors or paying subscribers.
You can sign up to support us and see past the 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 helps make possible what we do and gives you a special working relationship with Raikes.
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.
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.
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 £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. 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.
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 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.
