A hyperlocal news website in Southport is planning to expand its reporting, launch a daily newsletter and develop an advertising model after receiving £122,800 in government funding.
Stand Up For Southport is one of the recipients of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) £12m Local News Fund, a programme launched to support industry innovation and help fill so-called “news deserts”.
Founded in 2020 by Andrew Brown, a former editor for titles including the Mirror and Southport Visiter, Stand Up For Southport currently operates as a one-man operation publishing around four stories a day.
The government-funded expansion will be led by Phil O’Brien, who plans to spend around five months helping Stand Up For Southport to develop its audience and commercial strategy. He will bring his experience of driving New York City-based monthly lifestyle magazine W42ST, named after West 42nd Street, to profit.
O’Brien is also leading a separate DCMS-funded project, Data Language, which has received £268,695 – the biggest grant among selected publishers and organisations – to develop its AI-powered information-retrieval system for collecting and organising local knowledge and archived stories. The technology will be used to support the Southport publisher.
Brown launched Stand Up For Southport after being made redundant by Reach and seeing local newspapers disappear.
O’Brien became involved after Southport MP Patrick Hurley approached him following the infamous 2024 attack, in which three girls were killed by a knife attacker while attending a dance class. Riots, fuelled by online misinformation, followed.
A report produced by the DCMS examining the role of the media in the wake of the attack highlighted the need for more investment in Southport’s local news, as well as a need for closer police-media relations.
[Read more: Southport knife attack misinformation due to police PR secrecy say crime journalists]
“When the police, for example, called the press conference, they called all the national media and the TV, and didn’t speak to anybody locally,” said O’Brien, who’s originally from Merseyside and spoke to Southport residents in the wake of the attack.
“You’ve just got to turn up. The reliability of me turning up in Hell’s Kitchen and Andrew turning up in Southport just works… when big stuff happens, you don’t get forgotten.”
Hyperlocal Southport publisher targets 3,500 subscribers
Despite publishing around four stories a day, Stand Up For Southport has lacked basic audience analytics, a developed advertising operation and a direct relationship with its audience.
“There’d been no analytics on the site for six years,” said O’Brien, meaning Brown hasn’t been able to track where his readers were coming from. “Virtually all the traffic or the postings were on Facebook, of which most of the traffic is not coming from Facebook, it’s just people who bookmark the site.”
Before receiving the funding, Stand Up For Southport was occasionally making money through paid partnership posts.
The funding will allow him to launch a daily email newsletter on Mailchimp, due to launch next week, with a target to reach up to 3,500 subscribers by March.
“The packaging of the newsletter every day is a significant job, and Andrew will be able to concentrate more on that with this funding,” said O’Brien.
Two part-time contractors will also be onboarded: journalist Jamie Lopez, who also writes for The Lead, and audience development specialist Janelle Jordan. Marketing specialist Jo Delaney McGuffie, who was already working part time on the Southport title’s social media, will now focus on its local advertising model.
The site’s new revenue model will be made up entirely of advertising sold directly to local businesses, rather than programmatic advertising, though O’Brien said it may be possible to target subscription revenue in the future.
In a letter to the Local News Fund panel, Hurley said the title is targeting £8,000 in recurring revenue by March, and ten to 15 local advertising partners, while remaining free to read.
O’Brien is hoping the success he has seen with W42ST, which serves a neighbourhood of around 100,000 and became profitable within three years through local advertisers, will eventually be seen with Stand Up For Southport. W42ST was founded in 2020 and now has around 60 partner advertisers.
O’Brien said Southport has a gap in the market for a quality news site, but the long-form journalism model of the Manchester Mill “won’t work in Southport”.
“The Southport Lead is doing some of that, but there’s not enough people. But there are 100,000 people who want to know what the weather is, want to know what the traffic is… what’s happening at the weekend,” he said.
Around 15% of the Stand Up For Southport grant will pay for O’Brien’s time on the project. He said he would spend around 20% of his time working on the Southport publisher, 50% on Data Language, and the remaining 30% on W42ST, although he is covering his own travel and accommodation costs.
Southport title first in UK to use local news knowledge graph
O’Brien said there is no “secret sauce” coming from his experience in the US media, but Stand Up For Southport will be the first UK publisher to use Data Language and its tools, which have been developed at W42ST.
Data Language will use AI-powered tools to build a “knowledge graph” of the town, connecting information from public sources, such as Sefton Council meetings and planning applications, Stand Up For Southport’s existing archive of more than 10,000 stories, and local knowledge about people, places and the businesses it covers.
The aim is to give journalists a way to search across that information when researching stories, with links back to the original sources. A reader-facing version, similar to an internal LLM, will act as a “front desk” on the publisher’s website and answer local news-based questions. Residents can contribute local knowledge too, such as recommendations for coffee shops. Information provided will be source-linked and fact-checked to avoid misinformation, said O’Brien.
“Think of it as the front desk of the old local paper, where you could walk in and ask a question and someone who knew the town would either answer it or find the person who could,” said O’Brien. “The aim is to rebuild that, with the newsroom’s knowledge kept in one place instead of in the heads of the people who’ve been there longest.”
Currently its largest current customer base is in European agricultural markets, with news being a smaller segment of its clients. Funding for Data Language will be invested in engineering, market research and elements of design for the project. With the partnership with Data Language only funded for five months, it’s not clear what will happen when this ends.
By March, when O’Brien plans to return to the US, he would like to help leave Stand Up For Southport with “a future whereby this can be a sustainable business”.
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