Michael MacLeod has successfully monetized his interest in local news with two newsletters for Edinburgh and London in the UK. Local newsletters are a popular business right now. It's a great way to reach people in your city and a lot of people are fed up with big media outlets.
He joined for an interview to talk about he has attracted 23,000 subscribers, ads vs paid newsletters and the future of local news.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us what The Edinburgh Minute is all about?
Hello Pete! My name’s Michael MacLeod, a journalist of 20 years based in Edinburgh and London. The Edinburgh Minute is a simple free and ad-free daily newsletter containing links to original local journalism and community news. I send it at 7am every day.
It started as a hobby in 2023, with the aim of making it easier for readers to discover local news while supporting local publishers and journalists. Now, thanks to generous readers and a ‘pay if you want’ model, the newsletters have become my job. This allowed me to start a second one covering my original hometown of London last year.
As well as links to the news, readers can use the Minute to share their news too. Nothing’s too local. I’ve had more than 3,000 items sent in in the past year. All I do is verify them and publish them. Curating the Minute has utterly transformed my view of local news as doom, gloom, death and destruction to something entirely different. It’s also changed my perception of where I live and the wonderful people doing brilliant things who make it so much better than traditional media had me believe.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as a founder?
It was never meant to be a business, so I’m an accidental ‘founder’. In fact, I didn’t even plan to charge people for the newsletter. My good friend and former colleague Ally Tibbitt suggested early on that ‘people would pay for this.’ I thought, ‘nah, they wouldn’t.’ But keeping it free while giving people the option to pay if they wanted felt right to me and aligned with my strong belief in the importance of access to news.
So - thanks to posting consistently every morning at 7am (now for 670+ editions), I’m happy to say thousands of people support the newsletter. I won’t share revenue numbers but I’m earning more than I’ve ever earned. To be clear I am not totally minted! I had to go to business school (RBS Accelerator programme) to learn about how to run a business, how to pay your taxes, secure trademarks and IP etc.
The real answer you probably want is numbers based, so here are some numbers: 23,000 (free) subscribers, 700,000+ monthly post views, 750,000+ click-throughs for other local sources and thousands of pounds donated to the foodbank and local arts charities. The Edinburgh Minute has also been the referral source for 12,454 subscriptions for other publishers so far.
Why do you think local newsletters like yours are so popular?
Newsletters remain popular because the rest of the internet is so toxic. Our inboxes are one of the last-remaining safe-ish spaces on the internet. Readers tell me that some news websites are so bad, they’d given up on trying to follow local news. In some cases they’d also given up on voting in local elections, which, as a citizen and journalist who cares about local democracy, really upset me and motivated me to do something about it.
