Editor Birmingham Live on how the site became the UK’s top local title

“However, most of our 11 million people only visit us once or twice. You look at people who visit us 20 times a week – there are people on the app who come and read over 50 articles a week – they’re all very, very local.”

Brown said Birmingham created “a pretty good microcosm of the UK on a large scale”. For example, he said, Birmingham has a large number of benefit claimants and so the site has developed a good authority with Google to write about the issues they face.

“We have a reporter, David Bentley, who is exceptional at writing about the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions). Often the words “David Bentley” are better searched than the words “News Birmingham”. So we are recognized as an authority in this field. Obviously, by its nature, the people who are interested in the DWP will often be more than people in Birmingham.”

For similar reasons, all the articles Bentley has written aimed at Birmingham’s large Muslim population about prayer times mean he is considered a Ramadan expert by Google.

In the latest Press Gazette top 50 UK news websites, Birmingham Live grew 7% year-on-year to 11 million UK visitors, according to Ipsos iris. However, according to data from Sistrix, the site has seen a 15% drop in visibility on Google search results since the search engine’s major algorithm update in March.

According to Similarweb, 44.5% of Birmingham Live’s traffic comes from search in the last three months, 33% direct and 17% from social.

“I think we’ve gotten really good at adapting content” to different platforms

In addition to his options to focus on coverage, Brown attributed Birmingham Live’s success in reaching a wide audience to taking different approaches for each platform.

“I think we’ve gotten really good at tailoring content to specific audiences,” he said.

Brown contrasted that approach with what he said he saw when he started in print journalism, when he said audiences were treated more as “one homogenous group.”

“We recognize that our readers on Google Discover are different from our readers on Whatsapp, and I think we’ve gotten really good at tailoring content for them.”

He compared posting a story to Birmingham Live’s Whatsapp community to creating a newspaper billboard. These readers, he said, “probably have a lot of unread stuff, they’re very local, they’re kind of pressed for time.

“I think the respect we’ll show our Whatsapp readers is: We won’t tell you something unless you really need to know – it’s a massive fire, or a major murder, or road closures, etc.

Whatsapp communities, unlike Whatsapp channels, allow publishers to post messages directly to readers’ message feed.

A Google Discover reader (the news aggregation feed that appears on most Android smartphones), on the other hand, “is someone who fills time. There is much more lifestyle content, there is more read…

“If we just did Whatsapp, our audience would be very local, but they wouldn’t read more than two paragraphs very often. If we did Google Discover, our audience in Aberdeen could become bigger than our audience in Birmingham.”

Programmatic advertising continues to fund Birmingham Live, but it is experimenting with a paid newsletter

Despite Birmingham Live’s success attracting the occasional disappearing audience, Brown said he saw a focus on “200,000 people who come back 16 times a month” as the best way to create a business model “that doesn’t it’s just built on sand.”

He said programmatic advertising remains “the largest driver of digital revenue” on the site. But even without focusing on direct purchased advertising, Brown said that by addressing Birmingham Live’s loyal readers, “we are able to create sustainable advertisers that we know more about and can serve them better.”

For now, this will continue to be the main way the site generates revenue. Brown told the Press Gazette: “We want the news to be free. The advantage we have in Birmingham Live, which might not be the case for all the other regional titles, is that it’s such a big audience. There are two and a half million people in the West Midlands and, frankly, national publishers aren’t very interested in that.”

He said the publication’s audience grew when Birmingham Council declared bankruptcy: “nobody cared… our loyal audience grew, because they have nowhere to go.”

But the site is starting to look at subscription revenue. In early April, it launched Inside Birmingham, a paid newsletter written by Birmingham Live’s politics and people editor Jane Haynes. Brown said the effort was an attempt “to try to feel — if we’re writing this stuff for people to love and people to value, are they willing to pay for it?”

Hosted on Substack and charging £5 per month (or £40 annually), the newsletter follows similar efforts by Reach in Wales to test paid newsletters written by prominent reporters. It also follows the December launch of the Birmingham Dispatch, a Substack-based luxury publication launched by Mill Media to cover the city.

But Brown said of the new title: “I don’t see it as a competitor, and in fact I think it’s potentially beneficial. If we can get people paying for news in Birmingham, that’s a good thing for Birmingham Live… If they succeed, it creates a platform where we can succeed, so I wish them all the best.”

He added: “I don’t think our business model is broken in Birmingham. I think there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of eyes that we can put in front of things and so far it’s working.

“But we’d like to be in a place where, if the market moves this way, we’re writing enough things that people love and value that we can ask them to pay for things, and again, we’ll he had a better feeling for it. six months from now, when Jane’s email comes in.”

Another competitor Brown is relaxed about is the BBC, whose local pivot away from radio and into digital news production has unsettled several regional news bosses.

But Brown said: “The BBC has always been there. I’m something of a competitor – I was at a big fire today and the BBC will be reporting on it. If the BBC beat us to it and tell the story better than us, we learn from that that we have to be better.

“The BBC has stepped up – they’ve had more people reporting (and) now we see more of them in our world, but I just see it as a kind of challenge. And frankly, there’s every reason to believe we’re still capable of being faster and objectively better than their reporting because of the way we work. We are ready to fulfill our priorities.

“So I see them as a noisier neighbor than they were before, but it’s not something that keeps me up at night.”

“2023 was my worst year in journalism”

Birmingham Live employs around 30 journalists – fewer than it did before three rounds of cuts in Reach in 2023, which collectively made more than 700 journalists redundant.

Brown said: “Like everyone else, 2023 was my worst year in journalism. But I think the view would be that it puts us in a place where we can look to be sustainable. I like the idea of ​​being sustainable — I’d like a bigger newsroom, but I don’t want a newsroom that can’t afford to pay for itself.

“I think I did this last year. I think the first quarter numbers for Reach look good and I think Birmingham will reflect that. So it was hard.”

Brown said Birmingham Live reporters are not given target pages or a minimum number of articles to write in a day, but said content editors are expected to hit targets throughout the production they oversee .

He added that “the skills of a modern reporter are so high.”

“When our reporter goes out to a big fire, they don’t think about how it might best serve an Instagram Reels video. But because part of it, they know that if you don’t do any video, our social media editor will be on your case, or they know if you write a headline that doesn’t have any SEO terms in it, my executive editor will be on your case about this, has just become an integral part…

“I’ll see (younger reporters) being criticized by my former journalists on Twitter and I think – you just couldn’t strap their boots. They’re doing the work you were doing, at a higher volume, to more people, and with a kind of complexity that you could never have dreamed of at the time.”

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