What's new: It's Journalism Matters Week, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham has called local journalism part of the national infrastructure of a healthy country.
By the numbers: Up to 37 local authority districts now have no dedicated news outlet of their own, leaving as many as 4.4 million people living in so-called news deserts.
Why it matters: When local news disappears, so does the scrutiny of decisions made in your name. Staffordshire deserves news that is owned here, made here by local people, and answers to the people who live here.
This week is Journalism Matters Week, the news industry's annual campaign, co-ordinated by the News Media Association, to remind everyone why trusted journalism is worth having around.
This year it has a rather high-profile cheerleader. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has thrown his weight behind the campaign, describing journalism as part of the country's national infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have. His argument is a simple one: if more power is being handed back to communities, then "with greater local power must come local accountability."
We couldn't agree more. With local government reorganisation rumbling on across Staffordshire and big decisions being made about our towns, our heritage and our high streets, somebody needs to be in the room, reading the small print and asking the awkward questions. That somebody should be a local person who actually lives here, knows the area, and cares what happens to it.
Not all news is worth having
You'll see plenty of articles this week about why journalism matters, some of them from the bigger names in the local news game. They make some fair points. But it's worth asking what kind of journalism we're actually talking about.
You'll know the type. The same story rewritten fourteen times in a day, each version with a slightly more alarming headline, so it can be clicked and shared all over again. Headlines written to make you click rather than to tell you anything, because every click loads another round of adverts, and every advert earns a little more. Stories written once for a national network, then dressed up with a local place name so they look like they came from round the corner. And when the sums still don't add up, the news you need gets locked behind a paywall.
None of that is how you get information to people. It's how you get page views.
Journalism does matter, but local journalism isn't meant to be a gloomy headline engineered to keep you scrolling long enough to load another advert. It isn't a list of the worst things that happened on the A500 this week, served up in between sponsored links. Local news that only ever tells you what's gone wrong isn't really serving the community. It's farming it.
Staffordshire deserves better than that. Which is exactly why we started.
Jenna Goodwin
Why we exist
The Staffordshire Signal is a community interest company, founded in Staffordshire in 2025 with three simple aims: return ownership of local media to the county, champion genuinely independent journalism, and create real career pathways for young people who want to get into the industry.
There are no distant shareholders waiting for a dividend. Every penny we make goes back into telling Staffordshire's stories. We're regulated by IMPRESS, we label paid content clearly as paid, and no advertiser gets a say in what we write. If you've got a complaint, it comes straight to me, not to a call centre.
We also do things a little differently. We practise slow journalism. We don't race to be first with a half-checked story and a dramatic headline; we'd much rather be right. We read the planning documents, sit through the meetings, check the quotes and give people a fair right of reply. It takes longer. We think you're worth it.
Why we started a printed magazine
At a time when most publishers are cutting print, starting a magazine might look like an odd choice. It was a very deliberate one.
A magazine has no algorithm deciding what you're allowed to see. No pop-up adverts jumping in front of the story, no autoplay videos, and no "you won't believe what happened next". It's proper long-form stories you can sit down with over a brew, pass to a neighbour, or leave on the coffee table for the grandkids to pick up. It builds a connection with readers that a feed never could.
That's the ethos behind everything we do, and it's the one we're sticking with as we grow. Everything new we launch has to pass the same test: does it respect your time and your intelligence, and does it bring people closer together? If not, we're not doing it.
Jenna Goodwin
What we actually do
When Capital & Centric's plans for the former Spode Works landed, we didn't just rewrite the press release. We read the application, document by document, and found that the developer's own engineering report said the buildings weren't in a poor enough state to warrant demolition on structural grounds. We spoke to the artists, the businesses on site, the developer, the council, Historic England and the local MP, and published Inside the fight over Spode Works so readers could see the whole picture and make up their own minds.
That's the kind of journalism we believe in. But holding people to account is only half of it. Local news should also tell you what's going right, celebrate the people who make this county tick, and remind us all why we love living here. So alongside the scrutiny, you'll find:
- The Staffordshire Signal magazine, the county's only regional printed lifestyle magazine, reaching 40,000 to 50,000 readers across print and digital and telling stories from the heart of the county.
- The Staffordshire Signal Weekly, our quality digital newspaper, free in your inbox every Wednesday morning, with no clickbait and nothing rehashed.
- Signal TV, made with T Level Media students from the City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College, whose first major project is a documentary on Foxfield Colliery, featuring an interview with the only known living former miner from the site.
- Local history and heritage, because you can't understand where Staffordshire is going without knowing where it's been.
- Council and democracy coverage, now strengthened by our acceptance onto the BBC's Local Democracy Reporting Service.
All of this reaches nearly 50,000 readers, and every one of them is reading something made in Staffordshire, by people from Staffordshire, for Staffordshire.
What's coming next
This is where it gets exciting.
Signal TV is about to grow up. More documentaries, more news coverage, more vox pops and more filming at events across the whole county, including South and East Staffordshire, which see shockingly little video coverage of their own.
A podcast is on its way, including a weekly news bulletin read aloud, so the Signal is there for people who'd rather listen than read, or who find reading difficult.
More young people are joining the newsroom. We're taking on student placements through Keele University, covering everything from journalism and video to podcasting, photography and web development, alongside our T Level students and HND students. When people ask where the next generation of local storytellers will come from, our answer is: right here.
New ways to reach you directly. Social media platforms have a habit of deciding what you see and when. We'd rather you heard from us directly, which is why we've launched a WhatsApp channel, a Reddit community, and a few other things we'll be unveiling shortly.
And there's something bigger we can't quite tell you about yet. Let's just say it's been a very busy autumn behind the scenes at Signal HQ, and what's coming will change what we're able to do for Staffordshire over the next year. Watch this space.
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Get Instant UpdatesThe news deserts on our own doorstep
Staffordshire as a whole isn't a news desert. But plenty of the towns, villages and rural communities within it are. Places where the parish council meets with nobody there to report it, where a planning decision can change a village without anyone outside it knowing, and where good news goes uncelebrated because there's nobody to tell it. A hamlet in the Moorlands matters every bit as much as a city centre, and the people who live there deserve to know what's happening on their own doorstep.
That's what we want to fix. We'll be tackling it with hyperlocal news, made with and by the people who live in those communities. There's much more to come on that soon, so sign up for free to make sure you don't miss it.
We're here to stay
No clickbait. No story rehashed fourteen times. No national copy with a local name stuck on top. No locking your own community's news away from you. We're doing things the way people have told us they want them done: honest, unhurried, and made by local people who care about where they live.
It's working, and we're not going anywhere. We're here to stay.
How you can help
- Subscribe for free to The Staffordshire Signal Weekly and the magazine at thestaffordshiresignal.co.uk.
- Forward this article to someone who'd enjoy it, or anyone who's had enough of reading the same headline fourteen times.
- Join our WhatsApp channel for stories straight to your phone.
- Tell us your stories. Something going on in your street, your club or your parish council that nobody's covering? Get in touch.
- Support us as a local business. Advertising with the Signal means backing journalism that stays in the county. Enquire at https://www.thestaffordshiresignal.co.uk/advertise/
Journalism matters. Local news, made by local people, matters even more. Thank you for being part of it.
Jenna Goodwin is Founder, CEO and Editor of The Staffordshire Signal.
Why the Signal exists
Real news takes time. Thanks for taking yours.
You've just read a story that took time to get right. No clickbait, no racing to be first, no ads chasing you down the page.
I started The Staffordshire Signal because I got fed up of local news that chased clicks instead of stories. We're independent, not-for-profit, IMPRESS-regulated and owned right here, so we answer to nobody but you.
The honest bit: local news only survives if local people choose it. If we don't, it goes.
Jenna GoodwinFounder and Editor, The Staffordshire Signal
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