The Northern Agenda
In the past year The Northern Agenda - a brand bringing together politics coverage from Reach’s titles in the North of England - has been bringing stories from outside the Westminster bubble to a digital audience through a daily email newsletter and weekly podcast. The Northern Agenda newsletter has 5,000 subscribers actively reading each month - among them council leaders, senior businesspeople, MPs, government departments and think-tanks. The podcast has had 23,000 listens in this calendar year, with one episode focusing on the often-overlooked town of Barrow downloaded 3,000 times. A new feature has been the award-winning cartoons of Graeme Bandeira, which now appear every Friday to bring humour and biting satire to our coverage.
His illustrations have been a big hit on social media, with one about absent Liverpudlian MP Nadine Dorries getting 90,000 views on Twitter and another about Minister Therese Coffey’s carefree approach to Teesside crab deaths getting 70,000. To take the cartoons to another level, video producer Carly Holds took the static drawings and turned them into animated graphics, meaning readers could see the journey from pencil drawing to finished product and with the dialogue revealing itself piece by piece. One of Graeme’s pieces became an interactive graphic to illustrate a piece by Reach’s data unit into the eye-watering costs of consultants for hard-pressed town halls bidding for levelling up cash. Data journalist David Dubas-Fisher submitted Freedom of Information requests to 389 councils and revealed town halls spent £23m of public money on consultants to bid against each other for Levelling Up funds. Graeme’s cartoon depicted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove in front of a “£23m begging bowl”.
Praising our work, Labour’s Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy said: “This investigation by the Northern Agenda exposes the absurdity of the government’s Hunger Games-style bidding system."
The newsletter’s normal style is bite-sized stories about the North but every so often we devote most of an edition to exclusive reports on issues like the growing crisis in NHS dentistry in our region, the North-South divide on asylum and the £5m weekly bill to send local children to school in taxis.
Northern Agenda Editor Rob Parsons exclusively interviewed Michael Gove in the back of a taxi in Manchester - for a piece which also featured in the weekly podcast - and revealed that Education Secretary Gillian Keegan had rubbished mayor Andy Burnham’s education plans for Greater Manchester.
Clare Hayward of the NP11 business group said of The Northern Agenda: “Insightful and engaging reading…Your newsletter has become part of my daily read and has made such a difference to understanding the Northern landscape.”
Meanwhile we’ve experimented with running episodes of the podcast, which has featured interviews with the likes of Alastair Campbell and Rachel Reeves, on YouTube to reach new audiences.