Local news does not always have to mean outrage, arguments and bad news. London Magazine is building something different: an open place for people across the capital to share genuine local stories, celebrate their communities and get published.
Spend five minutes scrolling through almost any news feed and it can sometimes feel as though the world is permanently arguing with itself.
Politics.
Crime.
Anger.
Another row.
Another controversy.
Another headline deliberately written to make somebody furious enough to click it.
There is obviously a place for serious journalism. There are difficult stories that need to be reported and important issues that should never be ignored.
But that cannot be the whole story of a place.
Certainly not somewhere like London.
Because behind the headlines, millions of people are getting on with doing genuinely interesting things every day.
A community group is transforming a forgotten patch of land.
A school is celebrating an achievement.
A new independent business is opening its doors.
A charity has helped somebody through an incredibly difficult time.
An artist is putting on their first exhibition.
Neighbours are organising something together.
A sports club is looking for its next generation of players.
Someone has spent years quietly making their corner of London a little bit better.
These stories matter too.
And we think local media should make much more room for them.
London Magazine is deliberately trying to be different
London Magazine exists to tell stories about London and the people who make it what it is.
That sounds simple.
It should be simple.
But somewhere along the way, a lot of local media became increasingly driven by the same things dominating national news and social media.
Conflict performs well.
Outrage travels quickly.
Arguments generate comments.
Negativity can be remarkably good at keeping people scrolling.
That does not mean it is always good for the places being written about.
Our approach is different.
We want London Magazine to be somewhere people can discover what is happening around them without feeling exhausted afterwards.
A place where communities can be celebrated.
Where local people get recognised.
Where independent businesses, charities, schools, organisations, artists, volunteers and ordinary residents have somewhere to tell their stories.
Positive local news does not mean pretending problems do not exist.
It means remembering that a community is more than its problems.
London is not one community
It is hundreds of them.
One of the biggest mistakes a London publication can make is treating the capital as though it is one giant, identical place.
It isn't.
Life in Bromley is not the same as life in Camden.
Chelsea has its own character.
So does Croydon.
So do Hackney, Harrow, Lambeth, Greenwich, Lewisham, Westminster, Sutton, Newham, Richmond and Waltham Forest.
Sometimes a story matters across the whole of London.
Sometimes it matters enormously to six streets in one neighbourhood.
Both can be important.
That is why our wider publishing network is being built around individual communities as well as London Magazine itself.
Alongside London Magazine, contributors can now submit stories for publications covering communities across the capital, including Bromley Magazine, Bexley Magazine, Chelsea Magazine, Brent Magazine, Islington Magazine, Camden Magazine, Harrow Magazine, Newham Magazine, Merton Magazine, City of London Magazine, Redbridge Magazine, Enfield Magazine, Kingston Magazine, Ealing Magazine, Croydon Magazine, Barking Magazine, Dagenham Magazine, Tower Hamlets Magazine, Walthamstow Magazine, Westminster Magazine, Havering Magazine, Hackney Magazine, Haringey Magazine, Richmond Magazine, Barnet Magazine, Hillingdon Magazine, Lewisham Magazine, Kensington Magazine, Hounslow Magazine, Lambeth Magazine, Fulham Magazine, Hammersmith Magazine, Wimbledon Magazine, Tottenham Magazine, West Ham Magazine, Wandsworth Magazine, Southwark Magazine, Sutton Magazine, Waltham Forest Magazine and Greenwich Magazine.
That gives local stories somewhere more appropriate to live.
A brilliant community project in Lewisham should not need to become a "London-wide issue" before it deserves coverage.
Sometimes being important to Lewisham is enough.
And you do not need to be a journalist to contribute
This is probably the most important part.
London Magazine is open to submissions from anybody.
You do not need to work in PR.
You do not need to represent a large organisation.
You do not need to know an editor.
And you definitely do not need to describe yourself as a journalist.
If something interesting is happening in your part of London, you can tell us about it.
That could mean a resident sending photographs from a community event.
A parent telling us about something brilliant happening at a local school.
A charity sharing the results of a campaign.
A theatre promoting a new production.
A university researcher explaining something interesting happening in the city.
A local historian uncovering a forgotten story.
A photographer documenting a neighbourhood.
A business celebrating an unusual milestone.
A volunteer group looking for more people to get involved.
Or simply somebody thinking:
"More people should know about this."
That is enough of a reason to send it.
We have made the submission process much easier
One of the problems with traditional local news submissions is that nobody really knows where their email goes.
You find an address.
Write an email.
Attach a Word document.
Attach six photographs.
Hit send.
Then wait.
Was it received?
Did somebody read it?
Has it gone to the correct person?
Was the attachment too large?
Is somebody writing it?
Has it been rejected?
Nobody knows.
That is why London Magazine uses magazine.ad, our editorial submission platform for local voices.
Instead of sending stories into an inbox and hoping for the best, contributors can create an account, write or upload their story, add photographs and choose exactly where they would like it considered for publication.
If the story is London-wide, choose London Magazine.
If it is specifically about Greenwich, select Greenwich Magazine.
If it is a local story from Bromley, there is Bromley Magazine.
If something is happening in Hammersmith, Hackney, Camden, Croydon or one of the other communities we cover, send it directly there.
You can then follow the submission through the editorial process rather than wondering what happened to it.
Genuine local news is free to submit
That is another important point.
We do not want the ability to tell a local story to depend upon whether somebody has an advertising budget.
Genuine news and community stories can be submitted for free.
No hidden submission fee.
No credit card required just to tell us what is happening.
There are separate options for commercial content, paid campaigns and businesses that want guaranteed promotional support, but that is different from ordinary editorial news.
If your community group has done something brilliant, we want to hear about it.
If your charity has achieved something worth celebrating, send it.
If your street has organised something unusual, tell us.
If your school has an incredible pupil achievement, submit it.
If somebody in your neighbourhood deserves recognition, nominate them by telling us their story.
Local news should not only belong to the organisations that can afford a press office.
We still have editors
Making it easy to submit does not mean everything automatically gets published.
That matters.
magazine.ad is a submission platform, not a button that instantly puts anything onto our websites.
Stories still go through editorial review.
We look at whether something is genuinely relevant.
Whether the information is clear.
Whether the story has a real connection to the area.
Whether it needs more detail.
Whether photographs can be used.
And whether it feels right for the publication.
Sometimes we will come back and ask for more information.
Sometimes something may be better suited to another magazine in the network.
Sometimes we may decide not to publish something.
That is normal.
The technology makes it easier to get a story in front of an editor.
It does not replace editorial judgement.
We would rather publish something useful than something designed to make you angry
There is a temptation in modern publishing to judge everything by the number of clicks it produces.
But the biggest number is not always the most valuable story.
A piece about a small volunteer group might only be deeply relevant to one neighbourhood.
That does not make it unimportant.
A story about an independent shop might not become nationally viral.
It could still introduce hundreds of local people to a business they would otherwise never have discovered.
An article about a community event might not cause arguments in the comments.
Good.
Maybe it helps fifty people discover something enjoyable happening this weekend instead.
We think usefulness is an underrated measure of good local journalism.
So is happiness.
So is curiosity.
So is discovering something you did not know about the place you live.
Positive news does not mean boring news
There is also a strange assumption that good news is somehow less interesting.
We disagree.
Human beings are endlessly interesting.
London certainly is.
Tell us about the person who has spent thirty years running the same family business.
Tell us about somebody who has moved halfway around the world and built a life here.
Tell us about the teenager doing something extraordinary.
The eighty-year-old still volunteering every week.
The little restaurant everybody locally knows but nobody outside the neighbourhood has heard of.
The building with a strange history.
The forgotten corner of the city.
The local tradition.
The community garden.
The record shop.
The football club.
The theatre group.
The campaign that succeeded.
The idea that sounded ridiculous but somehow worked.
Those are stories.
And they are exactly the sort of stories local magazines should be telling.
Businesses are part of communities too
We also make no apology for covering local businesses when there is a genuine story behind them.
Independent businesses are a huge part of what gives different areas of London their character.
The cafΓ© everybody knows.
The family-run restaurant.
The bookshop.
The market trader.
The design studio.
The new technology company.
The person opening their first shop after years of planning.
These businesses employ people, occupy our high streets and become part of neighbourhood life.
That makes them part of the local story.
The difference is that we want something worth telling readers.
"Company sells product" is an advert.
"Local business celebrates 50 years on the same high street" is potentially a lovely local story.
There is room for both advertising and journalism.
We just believe readers deserve to know the difference.
PR professionals are welcome too
Being open to ordinary residents does not mean professional communications teams are excluded.
Quite the opposite.
Good PR people often know about brilliant local stories before anybody else.
Charities, universities, arts organisations, public bodies, businesses and national organisations all employ people whose job involves communicating what they are doing.
We want to make their job easier too.
Instead of maintaining enormous spreadsheets of editorial email addresses, contributors can use magazine.ad to select the publication that genuinely fits the story.
And this is where having individual local magazines becomes particularly useful.
A national organisation may have one project happening in Camden and another happening in Croydon.
Those are two different local stories.
They should be treated that way.
Localise the story, choose the right publication and give readers something relevant to where they actually live.
That is much more useful than blasting the same generic press release across the entire country.
London Magazine is part of something bigger
The platform behind London Magazine now connects contributors with 172 local, regional and specialist magazines.
That means the same principle being developed here in London is also being applied elsewhere across the UK and beyond.
But the ambition is not to create one giant generic website.
Quite the opposite.
We believe local media becomes more valuable when it becomes more local.
London Magazine can talk about London.
Bromley Magazine can talk about Bromley.
Camden Magazine can talk about Camden.
Leeds Magazine can talk about Leeds.
Consett Magazine can talk about Consett.
And the technology underneath them can make all of those individual publications easier to manage, easier to contribute to and easier to grow.
The infrastructure can be shared.
The identity should remain local.
Local journalism works better when local people are involved
We could employ hundreds of journalists and still never know everything happening across London.
No newsroom could.
The capital is too big.
Too varied.
Too alive.
But collectively, Londoners already know almost everything happening in London.
Someone knows about the new exhibition.
Someone knows the person raising money.
Someone knows why a particular building matters.
Someone knows the new business preparing to open.
Someone knows the community that needs volunteers.
Someone knows the story.
The missing piece has traditionally been getting that information from the person who knows it to somebody who can publish it.
That is the problem we want to make smaller.
So consider this an open invitation
If you are reading London Magazine because you live here, work here, study here, run something here or simply care about the city, you are not only a reader.
You can contribute too.
You might have one story to tell this year.
That is absolutely fine.
You may work for an organisation with stories every week.
That is fine too.
You may have never submitted anything to a publication before.
Even better.
Do not worry about making it sound like a newspaper article.
Do not fill it with corporate language.
Do not feel as though you need to make something sound bigger than it really is.
Just tell us what happened.
Tell us who is involved.
Tell us why somebody locally might care.
Give us the useful details.
Add some decent photographs if you have them.
And let our editorial team take it from there.
Add news. Not noise.
That phrase sits at the heart of magazine.ad for a reason.
There is already plenty of noise.
There are endless feeds competing for attention.
Endless opinions.
Endless arguments.
Endless reasons to be annoyed.
We would like to create a little more space for something else.
Stories that help people understand their neighbourhood.
Stories that make somebody discover a place.
Stories that recognise good people.
Stories that help communities find each other.
Stories that make London feel slightly smaller and a little more connected.
That is the London Magazine we want to build.
And we cannot build it from a newsroom alone.
We need Londoners to help us tell it.
If there is something happening where you live that deserves more attention, submit your story through magazine.ad and choose London Magazine, or select the individual London publication that best fits your community.
Your story does not need to change the world.
Sometimes it just needs to matter to the people living around the corner.
