Eastbourne Reporter is four years old! Our volunteer team reflects on where we are and how we can make it to five years - and beyond.

Nearly 100,000 people have read our evidence-based, impartial reporting and independent reviews in that time. They enjoy a clean, ad-free reading experience, with several free articles a month.

If we want our readers to be the main financial backers, we need to be transparent about our financial situation, and our plan to make your support count.

The next 12 months will be our push to see if Eastbourne Reporter can turn into a sustainable reader-backed business.

Why Eastbourne Reporter is different

The Eastbourne Reporter was launched to write about all aspects of life in our town by interviewing people directly and verifying information from public data or using reputable sources. We dig into the detail, and go the extra mile to find and share the truth.

You can read PR handouts and ad-based content elsewhere - but Eastbourne Reporter is different.

Financial situation

Our current income is around £7,000 a year

Our total revenue is currently £590 a month, or £7,080 a year.

This comes from two sources:

• Member subscriptions totalling £240 a month
• Donations from our two Patrons totalling £350 a month

Our current spending is £6,100 a year and rising

Our spend last year came from:

• Running costs (which include website, email, Impress fee, insurance, accounting...) totalling around £140 a month. These are rising. Half of this comprises an accountant's fee because we are a Community Interest Company and require a Companies House financial return.
• Paying Rebecca (the journalist behind Eastbourne Reporter and editor for our community writers) a fee for one and a half days of writing and editing a month, totalling £375.

Unpaid contributors

Rebecca Maer has kept Eastbourne Reporter running for four years by herself, while taking only a small fee despite the time she puts in.

She worked entirely unpaid for the first three years. In reality, she works up to eight days a month researching, writing and editing stories, compiling social media posts, and dealing with emails, admin and accounts.

The writing team has grown over the past year, with more people volunteering as community writers:

• Paul Bromley, an experienced, qualified journalist, contributes regularly with articles and analysis on Eastbourne's political news
• Gary Murray and Alison Norwood provide us with reviews of art events in town
• Liz Magraw, Mary Mckay and Berenice Pringle, community reporters we have trained, have contributed articles about living in Eastbourne

And on the administrative side, our team includes:

:: Will Callaghan, an unpaid director of Eastbourne Reporter CIC, with lots of experience to share from running Tech Resort and other businesses

:: David Lush, a journalist and researcher who grew up in Eastbourne, is working on figuring out how to help small, independent local news organisations establish themselves

:: Mariana de Araújo, who looks after IT maintenance.

Every single person listed here is providing their time and effort free of charge, with the hope that Eastbourne Reporter can became a source of trustworthy and relevant news for the town. But we can't keep going unless we can find the funding to hire dedicated staff members. Which means...

We need you 🫵

We have 181 subscribers to Eastbourne Reporter, 41 of whom are much-appreciated paid subscribers (20%), and we have 2,000 - 3,000 unique visitors per month.

If around 20% of those monthly visitors became 500 subscribers contributing £8 a month, our coffee + cake tier, we would have an income of £4,000 a month to:

• pay someone to help with the commercial side, to help with admin and commercial tasks that take up time Rebecca could be using to investigate, write, edit and train other writers
• pay other freelance journalists to write for us for a decent fee
• pay Rebecca, our founder and experienced journalist, to devote more time to Eastbourne Reporter

If we can achieve this by next March it would signal to us that the community we serve with Eastbourne Reporter is also interested in our service. Then we'll do our best to invest our time to keep it running longer term (imagine us in print!). If not, we will have to seriously consider our future 😞

So if you want us to keep providing Eastbourne with independent, well-researched and relevant local news, please become a paid subscriber (a £4 a month tier is also available) or help us by sharing what we do.

Thank you for all your support this far, and here's hoping it leads to many more anniversaries to come ❤️