Raikes: The rebirth of community journalism for Gloucestershire
Today we announce the launch of a new, quality digital magazine for Gloucestershire - The Raikes Journal, a community interest company dedicated to championing this county and its communities.
* Everything you read on Raikes is made possible by the generous support of our partners (who we will be revealing over the coming weeks) our founding members and our paid-up subscribers. A massive ‘thank you’ to all our other subscribers too. The support of all of you is invaluable! To get in touch email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
Journal 1. February 2024.
Dear readers,
A very warm welcome to the first edition of a new era for The Raikes Journal (CIC), a rebirth of the digital news service that was sponsored by county firms and ran with great effect through 2020 Covid-19 pandemic to support the hard-hit business community, embattled charities and vital education, training sectors.
That service is back as a community interest company - new, improved and made possible once more by generous county businesses, all of us dedicated to championing Gloucestershire, helping build community, a sense of place and pride in the county.
We will be introducing our partners over the coming weeks as we start to unlock the stories across the website, and add to them, as we publish our weekly ‘journals’ - email editions of our digital magazine. Its focus always on quality rather than quantity, on original, well-written stories rather than unedited press releases and lists.
Our team has incredible contacts already after writing about the county for more than two decades, and it thousands of real social media connections, but to make its mission to serve the community work Raikes needs your help - it needs you to sign up for those email journals.
In doing so you will not just be supporting Raikes’ mission, you will be part of it and you will be helping to deliver a renaissance in that now scarce commodity - quality local journalism, and building a credible platform for the county.
It is free to sign up, but those who pay for a subscription will receive two extra email editions of Raikes a week, plus other benefits - including access beyond any paywalls we need in place on stories to sustain us.
That includes access to our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire articles in our Reports & Deals channel, our on-going series following the fortunes of the county’s top 100-plus firms by turnover.
Paid-for membership also includes the ability to comment on our stories and gives you a voice to help shape our direction of travel.
And there is talk of a magazine to show off that glorious content - which paid-for members will hear about first!
Raikes will write the stories of Gloucestershire in such a way that whether you live inside or outside the county, if this website is the first thing you see when you search for ‘Gloucestershire’ you will want to be part of our community.
The team on Raikes built the old template for the newsletter model used by everyone else currently, but the editions it is about to start emailing will be new, fresh and interesting. Those journals will introduce you to the county’s incredible charities, companies, colleges, universities, training providers as we tell their real stories. We will introduce you to the people of Gloucestershire in the way they deserve to be introduced.
There are 2,500 charities in Gloucestershire – and they need the support of businesses more than ever; they need the skills of business, their expertise, to make their organisations resilient and sustainable. And businesses realise more than ever the force for good they can be, given the right opportunity.
Key to providing those skills and development for all - the element that completes the formula for success - are our incredible education and training providers.
With your support and input we will help all sides make those connections. With your help and support we can build a better Gloucestershire.
In case you did not meet our subscriptions page on arrival at The Raikes Journal, you can become a paid-for subscriber and help make all this happen for just 33 pence a day or £2.30 a week (£12 a month or £120 a year). Group subscriptions of two or more people enjoy a 20 per cent discount.
Or you could become a ‘Founding Member’, where you are so keen to invest in Raikes and see this all happen, because you too share the same values of community and want to deliver something of quality that the county can be truly proud of, that you ‘pay it forward’, as people say now.
Those Founding Members who match or better £250 annually will also receive a short 100 word article, with an image (to be supplied), on one of our email editions as a ‘thank you’ from us. And they will be on our radar when it comes to flagging their news, events, social media posts and stories.
If you want to go even further and get your company or charity mentioned on almost every single one of our stories you can become one of our partners (the elite band of companies and individuals that have already provided seed funding for this CIC project, all of whom we will be revealing to you shortly and cannot thank enough for their faith and support).
All our stories are editorially-led, but to help Raikes’ achieve its CIC mission you can support us further by paying for us to write content for you. This starts from as little as £75!! See our About Us page for more information.
Editions of Raikes’ weekly newsletter journals - free and paid-for - will collect as a library here on the home page and flow into our archive channel alongside what are currently three other key channels; Reports & Deals, Cyber and PR Wire - where we run the best press releases we spot.
Plans are to paywall all our copy after a period, making that paid-for membership a vital key to our archive too.
Why does any of this matter?
When I first started covering Gloucestershire more than 20 years ago the county was blessed with daily newspapers to fan the flames of community, celebrate our achievements and dig out those untold stories everyone has.
There were the two colossuses of the county's media, The Citizen (the direct descendent of Robert Raikes’ Gloucester Journal newspaper started in the city in 1722 – to whom The Raikes Journal’s name tips its hat and to which we consider ourselves a direct descendent) and The Gloucestershire Echo. Both of which published more than one edition daily, tailoring them to specific areas from the Cotswolds to the Forest of Dean, Stroud and Tewkesbury. The teams that created those papers are now the stuff of legends.
And there was the sister title of those newspapers, Stroud Life, plus the Stroud News & Journal, The Forester, Gloucester News and probably some we’ve forgotten.
Those publications have either gone or are shadows of their former selves. Even the BBC has had the knife out to its local news coverage. Today it is a barren landscape if you seek quality journalism committed to community. The brave hyper-local Stroud Times gives rare hope.
Yet our desire for quality, well-told, well-written, real journalism - not recycled press releases or lists of things - remains, as does the dream of many to become the next to hold the torch or real journalism and light our way. You only have to look at the number of admissions to the University of Gloucestershire’s brilliant journalism degree to see that is the case.
But as the university’s incredible team continues to cultivate scores of highly talented journalism students year after year, graduation sees most leave the county to pursue that profession!
Raikes is happy to reveal it hopes to provide placements for some of those students – placements on a real, journalistically-led platform that will publish on editorial merit stories those students produce.
And if we achieve our goal (which we will do with your support!) we will offer paid-for work for them and for freelancers too as we live up to our status as a community interest company.
If you believe in Gloucestershire and in keeping talent in the county, and if you want the county’s story told in the right way, to the highest standard, then we cannot say it enough, ‘please support Raikes!’.
Just lastly, I have been told by one or two, ‘I do support local business and value local journalism, but why should I pay for something I can get somewhere else for free?’.
The best way to answer that is something like this; firstly, is what you get for free generally as good as what you pay for? Do you really care about quality? Does it matter how your community is represented, how its stories are told and who tells them? And lastly, you can’t get what Raikes will produce, how it presents it and what it represents anywhere else.
Which only leaves room for me to thank everyone who has helped Raikes get this far already (I will never forget), and to wish you all a very, very happy and prosperous 2024 - and to hope we manage to meet along the way!
Very best wishes,
Andrew Merrell.
Editor and founder of The Raikes Journal CIC.
* Everything you read on Raikes is made possible by the generous support of our partners (who we will be revealing over the coming weeks - our founding members and our paid) up subscribers. A massive ‘thank you’ to all our other subscribers too. The support of all of you is invaluable! To get in touch email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
🔓 You’ve been reading a free edition of The Raikes Journal, for which we are grateful. Please do spread the word about what we are trying to do - create a real, journalistically-led, community-orientated, Gloucestershire-focused digital magazine. If you upgrade to paid, you will get on average eight extra members-only editions every month and will be able to see beyond any paywalls, as well as read Raikes’ rolling Top 100-plus Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You will also be allowed to comment on stories, make suggestions for what we should be writing about, vote in our awards, and might even be invited to our roundtable events. And you’ll be supporting the rebirth of high-quality journalism in Gloucestershire on a website championing the county you love — all for just £2.30 per week (£12 a month or £120 a year! Ask us about 20 per cent off for groups of two or more subscribers).