Author Archives: Dan Slee

In 2025, if you work in public sector comms you’re likely to be worried about AI while also using it while not admitting you are.

You are also likely to be using AI tools secretly on your own devices.

But if you are using AI, you are generating ideas rather than generating audio, video or images. 

These are the findings of a poll of more than communicators I conducted in early summer 2025.

It’s a set of figures that exposes a sector being asked to meet Sillicon Valley expectations with depleted analogue resources.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has talked about AI being the challenge of the generation. UK Government have also talked about £45 billion savings being powered by AI despite Gartner still placing AI in the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ section of the hype cycle.

Right now, the challenge of the century is being put on hold with sector reorganisation often a far higher priority.

Let’s go through the numbers.

The sector is both worried and excited

Firstly, the public sector is torn between being worried and being excited. Almost three quarters told the survey that they felt both worried and excited by AI. This is understandable. New technology brings opportunities as well as downsides. With AI, we’ve not even begun to work through them.

Worryingly, much of the sector is operating without a policy

UK Government guidance in the AI playbook has set out 10 principles that can be used to use AI safely. Government Communications Service have also produced guidance around generative AI. If you are part of the UK Civil Service you are covered. However, while wise communicators can learn from these approaches there is no obligation for them to be enacted by arms length bodies, NHS, Police, Fire & Rescue or by devolved Governments.

Alarmingly, more than half of public sector people who took part in the poll said they had no corporate AI policy. Just 26 per cent said they had such a document to map out how AI will be used.

This represents a worrying gap in governance and leaves open the chance of some potentially catastrophic errors being made. An AI notetaker that is not secure being used to log a potentially sensitive meeting may be accessed by a bad actor. The serious case review being exposed to an unsafe notetaker has the power to be career ending as well as put people in harm’s way.

Much of the sector is not declaring how AI is being used

Transparency is a key word in many published AI policies in the public sector and also the third sector. Trust is built by being open, the GCS generative AI policy says. So does Friends of the Earth. 

A lack of openness is storing up problems. Organisations have a chance to dictate when and where the story is first discussed. They have, as some would say, a chance to shape the narrative. That window is small and is gone for good when someone discovers that AI is being used and starts asking questions. Those questions are not unreasonable.

Just five per cent have a dedicated webpage disclosing what AI is used while less than one in ten disclose AI on every piece of content that’s produced with it. Just 11 per cent have had a conversation with stakeholders while 47 per cent say their organisation doesn’t admit they are using it.

‘We use AI ethically but we don’t declare it,’ caught my eye. One reading of this is that intentions are good. Another is that there is an unresolved struggle between what is the right thing to do.

Much of the sector are using AI on their own devices

The internet doesn’t care about a block, as the saying goes. It just moves around it like water moves around a boulder.

Anecdotally, people admit to using a tool like ChatGPT on their own devices because they are blocked from using them on work devices. This entirely mirrors early policies which blocked social media from public sector networks. Being charitable, perhaps bans are put in place with the best interests of the organisation at heart as an AI policy is missing.

Either way, people using AI tools at home are likely to be taking risks.

The additional comment ‘we don’t use AI… officially’ was enlightening in this section.

Most public sector comms are using AI to create ideas, not bad pictures

Interestingly, the top reason for using AI for public sector comms is to generate ideas with three quarters citing this as a purpose.  Spell checking and grammar came in second at just less than half while a third generated  press releases and just over two in 10 generate images.

So, it is the inspiration part of the process that AI is helping with as opposed to the hard content.

Within the additional comments, creating social media content appeared strongly. There were honourable mentions for using AI to summarise existing content as well as to make a start on creating text be that policy or comms plans. Transcription was also a frequent use.

The most popular tool is ChatGPT

Surprisingly, although Copilot is Microsoft’s AI tool for Office 365, it was not the most used tool in the public sector. This crown went to ChatGPT.

In the additional comments, there was slim pickings with occasional mentions of UK Civil Services’ in-house GCS Assist was mentioned in the comments but was not featured in the initial survey. I’d love to see the numbers for these in the coming months.

Elsewhere, there was not a lot of declared adventure with occasional references to DaVinci Resolve the video editing tool as well as other Adobe tools such as Photo Shop.

Conslusion

Walking to work this morning, I listened to a podcast where the presenter was interviewing an author who had wrote some poems. He told the author, a comedy writer and comedian, if he minded if he ran a poem through Google Notebook LM which then produced a podcast-style conversation to critique the work.

After the author’s indignance that this was possible the clip of the AI generated chat was played. There was much shock and surprise that this was possible.

I have a theory that these moments are getting faster and don’t last as long as they used to.

I’ve no doubt that I’ll look at this clip as an example of people in 2025 being amazed at something that will become something as straight forward as a web search.

It’s clear that in 2025, the public sector may have been told that AI is important but it is falling behind the rapid path it needs to take to do it well.

Methodology and prize winners

The survey was run in May 2025 and received 350 replies. A total of 291 were from the public sector which forms the basis of the results published.

As an incentive, a place on my ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS and a box of Gower Cottage brownies was offered as part of prize draw to people who completed the survey. Everyone who completed the survey and indicated they wanted to take part were included in the prize draw. First prize of a training place and brownies was won in the random draw by Nick Moore of Leeds City Council. A box of brownies was also won by Kia Newland (Notts Hospice) and Anna Toone (Tamworth Council).

Thanks everyone who took part.

AI disclosure: I used Grammarly to check spelling and grammar in this post.

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape including ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS.

There’s so much to shake a weary head at in journalism.

For starters, there’s lack of investment, cuts, clickbait, the slow death of print, reporters who don’t know the area, a lack of senior guidance and the lack of local stories on local news sites. 

But there are intriguing trends that an old hack like me thinks the public sector can learn from.

In short, it’s asking yourself what people would like and then creating content with that in mind. 

The two trends are solutions journalism and user needs. They’re a lot of crossover between the two. 

What solutions journalism is

In short, solutions journalism is reporting not just the problem but how people can crack the problem, too. For me, the BBC’s ‘Seven proven ways to help the planet’ falls into this category for me. So does Birmingham World’s ‘14 places to get a cheap day out in Birmingham and the West Midlands in May 2025. The problem being cracked here are ways people with families can keep their brood entertained.

itself is an idea that emerged in a New York Times column after 2010 that news isn’t just reporting what’s gone wrong but what people are doing to tackle the problem

More seriously, Reuters Institute for Journalism has carried out research showing that it is starting to get results across the world. If you are fed-up of a wave of bad news here’s what’s being done about it too.

This is a numbers game. There is further research that readers spend more time on solutions journalism stories. If you are a publisher, this is a little flash of gold.

What user needs journalism is

Like many people in the public sector, user needs has been the driving force of public sector internets of the past 15 years. Government Digital Service and others have had the unbreakable mantra of user needs as central to what they do. It makes sense. You want going to a .gov.uk website to be as easy as possible.

What I’ve not been aware of so much is ‘user needs’ in journalism. The more I hear about it the more I wonder if this is also something to pay attention to. 

The user needs model is focusing on what users literally need first. The apoproach, it seems comes from the BBC circa 2016 and has been refined through data science. 

The concept is that there are four catageories for consuming news.

Knowledge – keep me engaged and update me

Understanding – educate me and give me perspective

Feeling – divert me and inspire me

Doing – connect me and help me

An analysis has shown that readers stay longer when these approaches are tried. Readers are also more loyal, it seems. Reuters Institute Digital News 2024 devotes an entire chapter to it.

Brighter people than me insist that ‘solutions’ journalism’ and ‘users needs’ are slightly different in approach with solutions more tactical and user needs adopted on a newsroom-wide basis. That’s fine. It’s an argument I’ll steer clear of. 

But what can public sector comms learn from all this? 

For me, the really interesting approach both share is thinking about what will work for the member of the public. What matters to them?

On the one hand, encouraging people to stay longer on your website is not strictly a metric the public sector goes after. You want to find out swimming pool opening tikes and then go.   But the concept of ‘user needs’ is something that the public sector web is used to.

What it can mean, and I think this is wonderfully attractive, is to wonder what happens if you put the interests of users first. Maybe some of the time. Going back to the health term activities, councils are used to writing three press releases to give each a moment in the sun. One is a free swimming at the pool, another is a town centre fun day and the third is an event in the park. But what happens when you parcel them up differently, so they can be one compelling piece of content that gets more eyeballs?

The reality is that newspapers don’t have the same need for press releases anymore because they have stopped being newspapers.

Instead, they are digital-first news brands who put greater value on clicks than they do print readers. 

I started to look at these two approaches with a view to advise reshaping content sent to news titles in the area. 

I’m coming round to the idea that maybe its public sector content itself that needs to experiment with these approaches. 

It would be interesting to see what would happen if it did.

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Creative Commons picture credit: ceridwen / Newsagent, Hampstead / CC BY-SA 2.0

I enjoyed Paul Masterman’s LinkledIn post the other week. Strolling through Paris, he came across a statue.

Who was the great man being celebrated? A poet? Artist? Footballer?

No, it was a Clerk of Works Adolphe Alphand who had helped build what the 19th century French capital would look like. In other words, a council worker.

Paul’s post – you can read it here – came in the same week that a politician threatened public servants with the sack for working in a field he didn’t approve. A cheaper stunt I struggle to recall. 

It got me thinking of how public service has been constantly cheapened. The drip-drip of ‘non-jobs’, ‘gold plated pensions’ and ‘lazy council workers.’ Teachers are the enemy. Then doctors and nurses were the enemy. Then council workers again.

The celebration of a civil engineer with a statue made me recall a visit to Plymouth City Council. The entrance hall to the council building was a celebration of the post-war vision of rebuilding the city better.

I loved it because my Dad was a town planner. He became one because he was captured by the vision of building a better place for people to live. He was a dedicated man who took early retirement but never once regretted his career path.

The regeneratiuon of Plymouth was celebrated in the 1946 film ‘The Way We Live’ which was part documentary and part communications piece. You can watch it on the BFI website here.

In the film, a visitor tours the city and sees how a family in cramped housing will benefit from the rebui;ld masterminded by planners. It’s optimism is overpowering. 

The public sector is full of people who make a difference. Let’s build a statue to all of them.

Finally. Here’s some good news if you look after a Facebook page.

Content from pages is being seen again in people’s timelines. 

But before you start celebrating and dusting off the 2010-era comms plan, links haven’t come back and I really don’t think they ever will. Yes, I know your web team like them but they don’t run Facebook. The last time driving traffic to the website was a winning strategy Donald Trump was just a reality TV star. 

Stick with me, this is a story told over three charts from Meta’s Transparency Centre.

How things were

The first chart is from 2021 and shows 14 per cent of people’s Facebook timelines coming from pages. A meagre 6.6 per cent of this have come from posts with a link. Almost a fifth of all content came from Facebook groups.

How things got 

This is the chart that led to dry mouths and rising panic. In early 2024, Facebook page content in timeline has literally disappeared. It didn’t matter if you had a link or not it was 0.0 per cent of people’s timelines were from a page. Unless you were paying people were not seeing your content. 

Facebook group content was staying buoyant. 

The other change was what is classed as ‘unconnected posts’. This is content served-up by Facebook’s AI-powered ‘discovery engine’ which seeks to put content in front of you that it think you’ll like.

To illustrate this, one night I was on Facebook discussing Brunton Park, home of Carlisle United, with my brother. A few hours later, I was served content from a group I wasn’t in showing how Bruntomn Park looked in the 1980s. Niche. But it chimed with the niche chat I was having. Posts like these attuned to users’ discussions rose to just over a quarter of everything that was seen.

How things are now

Right now, the numbers have returned slightly for Facebook pages. Just over 11 per cent of content is from pages but less than one per cent of it contains links. Interestingly, this link penalising is replicated with Facebook groups you’ve joined as well as unconnected posts. The moral of the story is that links remain algorithmic poison.

The unconnected posts numbers remain really strong at just over a third.

What’s the message?

Overall, keep away from links but there’s also potentially mileage in posting content that people may be talking about or may be interested in. So, maybe content directly about what to do to keep children busy in the holidays may be a strategy to double down on.

Facebook groups have never gone away. 

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Creative commons credit: Waterloo Station, 1984 by Ben Brooksbank.

Last week, I heard that Nick Booth had died and as with so many others who knew him even slightly, it stopped me in my tracks.

A couple of weeks before I’d heard that Ben Whitehouse had also passed away. I only met Ben once in person yet through Twitter I felt I knew him far better. As @benjionthetrain, he tweeted his commutes.

Ben was a kind man, often thinking of other people and his tweets being a thorn in the side of New Street management showed what Nick Booth often referred to as a ‘Git Citizen.’ Someone who was using technology to make organisations more answerable.

I’ve been reflecting these past few days as I’m sure anyone who knew Nick even a little bit has.

Nick taught me a lot. A former BBC journalist, he was a passionate advocate for using technology to bring people together and in his words, making the world slightly less s**t. 

Nick was the first person to show me what Twitter was and how social media could revolutionise my job as a press officer. “We no longer,” I recall him saying that day, “have to go through the Priesthood of journalists to talk to our residents.” As someone who was a journalist and is still in the NUJ today that was iconoclastic as it was exciting.

Nick Booth, or @podnosh as he was also known online, had a profound impact on the public sector. Along with Dave Briggs he showed people how the internet could be used as a power for good. The late John Popham was another. All those people opened so many doors in the early years of social media from 2008.

As I reflected on that first day I heard Nick speak, I reflected on what he said that day. He live tweeted to ask Twitter how the a council could use it. John Popham and Paul Webster replied and my mind was slightly blown.

He showed how Birmingham Post reporter Joanna Gearey had used Twitter to check out reports of an incident at New Street Station. Joanna went on to work for The Times, The Guardian and Twitter itself.

He also showed a video shot by a Birmingham Councillor Martin Mullaney highlighting the problem of graffiti tags. So, today, I dug out the clip on YouTube and watched it back.

Clumsy and unedited, Martin held the video camera in selfie mode to talk to the camera and show the problem in a way I hadn’t seen before.

Looking back, Nick’s presentation that day was in itself a masterclass. Here are three ways social media will be used. This is going to happen, he said. He switched on a lightbulb over my head that changed the trajectory of my career. I set up what was the fourth ever local government social media account. I started blogging. I ended up going freelance.

When I went freelance Nick was supportive. He came over to Walsall with the late Steph Clarke to give some basic advice. “Don’t work with w*****s, know the value of your worth and give a s*** about what you do.”

At Steph’s funeral, the vicar removed his dog collar to recall how Steph had told how proud she was that she did a job working with Nick here she gave a s**t and made a difference. It was a remarkable funeral for a remarkable woman.

So many of those early pioneers are no longer with us. We stand on their shoulders yet where are the blue plaques for them? 

As I reflected on Nick, I searched YouTube to find a clip of him speaking to remind myself of his voice. A born storyteller,  his time as a journalist allowed him to understand what made a tale. His deep drive to make the world a better place and to bring others along with him.

The clip I found on YouTube was Nick in his pomp speaking of two stories. Both cut to the centre of who he was. In 10-minutes he tells the story of two Birmingham bloggers deciding to build a better version of the £2.7 million Birmingham City Council website in a day with other people’s help. The bccdiy project embarrassed the council by showing how badly they’d been had by their suppliers.

The second was the Social Media Surgery project. This span out from an idea from Birmingham blogger Pete Ashton. It sat volunteers who knew how social media worked alongside community groups who didn’t. Many Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter accounts were set up as a result.

You can see the clip here: 

Watching it back, it reminded me how the internet can be a force for good if good people use it with a common purpose. 

Scrolling online, I was struck by how many people had met Nick and had had their own individual moment of revelation thanks to him. It seems grotesque that he’s no longer here. If I think that I can only imagine what his family and close friends must be thinking. I hope they take comfort from what high regard he is held by. I loved what Lloyd Davis wrote. I love that his family have looked at some of the messages. I hope that the love for him is felt by them in the path ahead.

Yet, Nick was not an earnest person. He was fun to be with and was pleased to see you. 

I’m sad that after Impact Hub in Birmingham closed I didn’t bump into him so often. 

Scrolling through old messages, as many have I’m sure since hearing the news, this caught my eye. We were talking about the closure of Impact Hub in Birmingham. This had been a co-working space and venue for likeminded people to meet-up. It’s closure had reminded my of the film ‘The Commitments,’ I told him on a conversation in Messenger. The band breaks-up. Surely, it’s been a failure? Not at all. Its success can be judged by what those people went on to do, I’d suggested.

He responded:

The people he had an impact on and what they did should absolutely be part of Nick’s legacy.

Steph Gray, who founded Helpful Technology and ran UK Govcamp for several years, the other week was kicking around the idea of exploring ways to capture important content from expired websites. I do hope podnosh.com can be one of the first projects. I’d chip into that.

Creative commons credit: Nick Booth at commscamp 2013 by Paul Clarke.

Speak to almost anyone who has to use a Reach plc news site and they will roll their eyes and talk about how painful an experience it is.

There is the story, perhaps ubiquitous, of a senior Reach executive getting so frustrated with the user experience on he threw his phone across the room in frustration.

Former reporters who worked for the titles are often less glowing.

However, there is an emerging trend for email first subscription news. Over the last new months I’ve been intrigued by this approach. So I thought here’s a long reader read. 

So what’s the problem with local news? 

In a sentence, they are on their backside because of the internet.

People have stopped buying newspapers. Print circulation by 2017 has halved with just over 30 million copies sold.

So newspapers have closed down. By 2019, more than 300 local news titles have been closed.

Ads went online. Regional news accounts for less than £500 million of a £36 billion pie with Meta and Google gorgingon almost all the cake.

News deserts have emerged. In Lewisham and Gateshead, for example there are no newspapers. In London there is no dedicated news title. Readership figures across most of London is pitifully low. 

The impact of all this comes together to land in the lap of the public sector. 

There is a measurable decline in participation in civic life. As reporting drops, voting declines and the organisation is less accountable. The local title that waves through your press release is not a long term win for anyone. 

How bad the Reach experience is

I headed to a Reach website as research for this. I straight away hit a pop-up asking me for permission to give access to 5,885 individual partner requests for a range of tasks including 343 for ‘measuring content performance’ and 586 for ‘special purposes’. Scrolling through the list of partners on a laptop took me more than four minutes.

That’s even before I got to the actual site.

At their best, Reach sites can still shine a light on the work of councils, fire and rescue, NHS and police forces. But newspapers of records that listed every decision have largely long gone across the UK. I can still see elements of them in Northern Ireland and Scotland but in most of England and much of Wales they’ve didappeared. Their purpose has changed. What was everything about the community is now everything about the clicks. If that’s a click that’s actually another part of the country then that’s tough. A couple of years ago I carried out an analysis of news across 30 regional titles from across the UK. What was clear that in print, they still carried a clear majority of local stories. On Facebook, this had dropped to 50 per cent.

I’ve a feeling hard won reputations of regional titles for local community news built over more than a century are being chopped up and fed into the furnace to keep the train moving along the tracks.

So, the local title’s Facebook feed rather than to inform tries to get you to click. If the story is in Hull rather than your hometown that doesn’t matter so much. When One Direction founding member Liam Payne died Reach’s Black County Live pumped out 81 Facebook posts in 36 hours with 42 per cent of comments criticising the relentless strategy.

Indeed, it took an episode of The Rest is Entertainment podcast to call them out for a strategic change to take place. 

A clicks first approach means often Facebook timelines are filled with posts that get reactions in what appear to be thinly-policed comments sections.

In defence of the model

In the past, Reach has strongly defended the company’s tactics. The landscape has changed, they say. These tactics pay to keep the lights on and keep journalists employed. I get that. Campaigns such as that on Birmingham Live which covers the call for a public inquiry into the Birmingham Pub Bombings calling for a public inquiry are funded by those clicks, Reach has said.

Reach’s own financial statement pointed to the Liverpool Echo’s coverage of the Southport murders which turned into riots, as an example of important journalism. But they are doing it at a 19 per cent profit margin. As a comparison, Sainsbury’s profit margin is a mere two per cent. Nothing wrong with profit, surely? But is it all being reinvested for tomorrow?

Besides, Reach are only doing what others are doing. They’re just better at getting more clicks. Twenty of the top 25 regional websites by audience are Reach titles. Their Manchester Evening News title has an audience of 12.6 million and tops the chart. It’s not clear how much of this is sport with the city having two internationally famous football teams. 

I started in hot metal and worked in the pre-internet glory days. It would be easy to dismiss me as a jaded old hack. But I love news and I want it to succeed. It breaks my heart seeing newspapers fail and standards falling. 

Why local news matters

As the reporting of council matters declines voter turnout falls with it. This was a conclusion of the Cairncross report into UK journalism. This independent report was commissioned by the Teresa May Government.  It also highlighted what is described as ‘public interest news and information.’ 

Rachel Howells Doctoral thesis cited by the Cairncross report shows a link between the decline in journalism in Port Talbot and voter turn-out. 

Maybe if people stop being interested in democracy don’t be surprised if they are attracted to something else. 

The false dawn of hyperlocal news

You may recall the promise that hyperlocal news would replace those declining news rooms. Some great work was done by Talk About Local around 2010 which encouraged a network of local news sites largely run by volunteers. There have been some long running examples of hyperlocal journalism such as OnThe Wight which as been running since 2005. Indeed, many of Press regulator’s IMPRESS’s 200 members have hyperlocal roots. But the audience for hyperlocal news sites has been dwarfed by hyperlocal Facebook groups where news breaks organically in quite different ways. 

Email first news isn’t actually new

Back in 2010, I heard in Birmingham what was one of the most illuminating talks I’ve ever heard by Marc Reeves. He had just left the editorship of the Birmingham Post and was involved with Business Desk. This still thriving site delivered news by email every morning to busy people’s desk ready to help them set-up for the day.

This was a key factor in tweeting links in the morning when I co-founded a comms platform with a former colleague.

Indeed, Reach titles have been tapping into email for years. Myself? I subscribe to Stoke on Trent Live’s excellent Stoke City coverage. When I was a kid I’d cycle to the paper shop to buy the Evening Sentinel’s Peter Hewitt match reports. Now, I get the far better informed coverage by email from their Stoke reporter Pete Smith. Thanks, email. Thanks, Reach. 

But subscriber email first news is new 

Much has been made of the wave of innovation. In Manchester, The Mill has chalked-up 50,000 subscribers. The company behind it raised £350,000 including some notable names. A raft of similar models have launched. Overall, I counted 19 email first subscription models across the UK. 

Journalism costs. Having no journalism in your town also costs but the bill for this is markedly different.

What do they look like? They’ll often be some news aggregation of other sites. But so far this year Manchester’s The Mill has published at least 16 original long form stories in the first three months of the year. 

For example:

• A piece that speculates on why companies are leaving media city?
• A long piece on the struggle for control of Boohoo the online clothes firm.
• A fiesty investigative piece on the role Sacha Lord is playing in Manchester.

All of these look like meaty topics for readers to sink their teeth into.

Or in Birmingham’s Dispatch whose patch is blighted by a long running council waste worker’s strike.

• Claim and counter-claim on the Birmingham bin strikes.
• Speculation the Government should get involved in the bin strikes.
• The role a Birmingham suburb has played in the film industry.

I can absolutely see the logic in the model. If you are a news company and they your email you are not beholden to Google and Meta. Your business may not be subject to an algorithm’s whim.

I can also see the logic of steering clear of pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap clicks. If their schtick is quality and not clicks they don’t have to worry so much about headlines which tease then under-deliver. 

As a user experience, it’s agreeably clickbait free and if I click on a story I can read it through without being interrupted by banner ads or pop-ups. 

What email news means for public sector comms

If you work in a council, NHS, fire and rescue or police comms teams will this make a huge difference to what you do?

With 17 stories a month on The Mill’s website, for example, the tales are likely to be more about holding people to account rather than throwing content into an ever-hungry requirement to post dozens of times a day on Facebook. So, a council’s failures in a bin strike may get coverage. Its programme of town centre events probably won’t.

Besides, they may break a story that is then followed-up by more established titles such as the BBC.

So far, the model appears to be paying for itself in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. There’s no evidence yet that the model will replicate itself well in smaller communities outside of big cities.

All this loops back to your organisation’s own channels. Have strong channels. You’ll need them. 

Ofcom say that the most popular way people find out local government information is through Facebook groups if you are aged between 25 to 64. It’s as much as 50 per cent for this demographic. Newspaper websites are around 20 per cent and email is half of that. So, maybe lets not get too carried away.

Would email first news pay in smaller areas? 

An average reporter’s job on HoldtheFrontpage.com is £30k a year. Back of fag packet maths means that more than 3,300 subscribers are needed at the full fat £8.95 a month that’s at the upper level of monthly subscription charges. But. Just eight per cent of UK people are prepared to pay for journalism.

What the email subscription news landscape looks like

Here’s a quick trawl. This is limited to sites which have a free and paid subscription model. There’s a few substack accounts that I’ve not included for this reason. Not every subscriber pays. 

A list of subscriber-funded email first news sites

Let me know what I’ve missed from the list. I’m not seeing anything in Wales, Northern Ireland or other parts of the UK.

NORTH WEST 

Blackpool Blackpool Lead (2,000 subscribers) https://blackpool.thelead.uk/ free and from £4.99 a month.

Manchester The Mill, (50,000 subscribers) https://manchestermill.co.uk/about/ free and from £8.95 a month.

Liverpool Liverpool Post, (30,000 subscribers) https://www.livpost.co.uk/ free and from £7 a month.

North West Stored Honey cultural news (n/a subscribers) https://www.stored-honey.com free and from £4 a month.

NORTH EAST

Teeside Teeside Lead (n/a subscribers) https://teesside.thelead.uk/ free and from £4.99 a month.

YORKSHIRE

Calderdale Calderdale Lead (n/a subscribers) https://calderdale.thelead.uk/ free and from £4.99 a month.

Sheffield The Tribune, (30,000 subscribers) https://www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/ free and from £8.95 a month.

MIDLANDS

Birmingham Birmingham Dispatch 25,000 subscribers https://www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/ free and from £8 a month.

LONDON

Leytonstone Leytonstoner cultural news (n/a subscribers) https://leytonstoner.substack.com/ free and from £5 a month.

London Londoncentric (19,000 subscribers) https://www.londoncentric.media/ free and from £5.96 a month.

London The London Culture Edit cultural news (n/a subscribers) https://nancydurrant.substack.com/ free and from £6 a month.

London The London Minute (n/a subscribers) https://londonminute.substack.com/ free and from £5 a month.

London The London Spy (n/a subscribers) https://www.thelondonspy.co.uk/ free and from £5 a month.

SOUTH

Brighton & Hove Brighton & Hove Wrap (n/a subscribers) https://thebrightonandhovewrap.substack.com/ free and from £5 a month.

SOUTH WEST

Somerset Somerset Leveller free and £6 a month.

SCOTLAND 

Scotland UK, Scottish and world news (n/a subscribers) earlyline.co free and from £6.99 a month.

Edinburgh The Edinburgh Minute (20,000 subscribers)  https://edinburghminute.substack.com/ free and from £5 a month.

Edinburgh Gayle’s Guide family friendly places to go (n/a subscribers): https://gaylesguide.substack.com/ free and £4 a month.

Glasgow The Glasgow Wrap (n/a subscribers) https://theglasgowwrap.substack.com free and £5 a month.

Glasgow The Bell (n/a subscribers) https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/ free and from £8.99 a month.

If you are involved in trying to work out how news can work in 2025 I wish you luck. It’s such an important thing to get right for all of us. 

Creative commons credit: WH Smith, Widnes, 1986 by Roger Cornfoot.

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Thanks Karen for spotting the Somerset Leveller.

As a communicator, you’ll know that video is often the most effective way to reach people.

Half of all time spent on Facebook is spent watching video and we retain 90 per cent of a message compared to just a tenth of it in text. 

But creating video takes longer than writing out a sentence. So what can we do? 

If you wanted to, you could create a basic avatar for your organisation in less than five minutes. An avatar is an AI-powered video likeness of someone who can then deliver your script. Or maybe you need to borrow a voice for a voiceover.

If you are public sector, there’s a few things to take into account first.

Firstly, have you got an AI policy? 

In 2025, more than 20 per cent of the public sector are using AI, according to the Alan Turing Institute. But how many of those are using it without having an effective policy in place? The number of people who are creating work arounds isn’t clear but its likely to be significant.

If you haven’t got an AI policy here’s a few pointers for you.

An avatar for external comms: probably not 

Trust in AI is a huge issue. A 2025 UK Government tracker survey said that 71 per cent trust the NHS to use AI but just a third trusted Westminster. Not only that, almost half UK people in a 2024 UK YouGov study said they’d not trust content marked as AI.

So, the idea of sending an avatar out to bat with a media statement on an issue feels eye-rollingly bad. When we want to hear from an organisation we still want to see the whites of people’s eyes. 

An avatar for internal comms: maybe 

How about an internal audience? We need to qualify this. An avatar for an internal message from the senior leadership team doesn’t feel particularly wise. However, there may be places where internal training videos could benefit from an avatar in principle. How you deliver this will decide how successful this is likely to be. Yes, you need to mark it as AI. YouGov data has shown that nine in ten people of all ages want to see AI content marked so they know what they are dealing with.

A generic avatar maybe not

There are several places where you can experiment with off-the-shelf avatars. HeyGen or veed.io are one of two tools that canm create avatars for you. If you’d like a generic received pronunciation voice then there’s certainly something for you. But would this work in Dudley in the Black County? I suspect not.

A localised avatar

However, you can reate an avatar with a local voice using HeyGen. You sit the person down in front of a webcam, you ask it to read set passages and from that a local face and voice can be created. 

However, the issue with this is that it may be good but it’s not as good as the real thing. In this example, I’m saying the word ‘path’ as though I’m from the south of England which I’m not.

Creating audio

Creating audio for a voiceover is more effective than creating video and audio at the same time. Eleven Labs does a good job of with audio that can be used to narrate your next video. It is quite handy at replicating accents that are inputted to it.

The awkward GDPR issue

However, if you are looking to create an avatar likeness or to use the voice of a member of staff do remember that GDPR kicks in. You need their permission. You’ll need their permission for every delivery too.

You may be tempted to use that voice in the delivery of press releases on the website or in other public facing content.  You’ll need permission for each delivery. When that volunteer with the distinctive local voice gets tapped on the shoulder and asked why they are closing that person’s local library the volunteer voice may quickly lose interest in being the face and voice of the cost-cutting organisation. 

At any point said voice actor can withdraw permission for their voice and likeness to be used. This may leave you in an awkward position of losing a stack of content. 

Dubbing isn’t that great

Eleven Labs and others do offer the ability to translate from one language to another using AI. Don’t do this without a translator. The risk of mistranslating some medical advice or some important information is significant.

Welsh communicators have long warned against the use of Google Translate as a time-saving tool. All-important subtlety can be lost and the text can be mangled. AI tools may be useful but I can’t stress enough that they still need human oversight. 

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons Buxton by Anthony Ewart Smith

Once upon a time, a footballer angry at being dropped stormed into his manager’s office to demand why he had been dropped.

Three minutes later, the door opened, the player came out smiling.

He was still dropped, but the manager made him feel a million dollars and gave him cause for optimism.

So, it goes in comms the skill to say ‘no’ is one we all need to have but so hard to do.

At commscamp Scotland, Bridget Aherne’s session entitled ‘How do we tell people to f**k off?’ should be included in the comms syllabus. Using the Chatham House rule, here’s a summary and some extra points that struck me.

Why saying ‘no’ is important

The middle manager demands posters, a video or an X account. You think its a bad idea. So, what do you do?

Unless you say ‘no’ from time-to- time you are little more than a glorified shorthand typist. It is your job as a communicator to help the organisation communicate. Unique amongst all jobs everyone thinks they can do it. Your skills and your advice is the reason why you are employed.

You are also setting boundaries. That’s important.

The art of saying ‘no’ is not saying no

There’s sometimes value in a flat ‘no’. But the best results, like the football manager with his angry player, sometimes are subtle. The best results often come not from a blunt refusal.

‘Yes, but…’ 

‘Yes, and…’

‘Yes, we can talk about posters, but what is it you are trying to achieve that I can help you with…?’

‘Can we just spend five minutes just seeing if there isn’t a better route?’

Saying ‘we’

If you listen to the language of good football managers, it’s often ‘we’. We need to pull together. We need to head in this direction. When the team loses everyone loses from the fans, team, manager and board of directors. 

Using ‘we’ also starts to take the heat out of a possible confrontation. I’ve seen this done with clarity from the start.

‘We need to be clear that we are all on the same side here. I want you to be successful. We can do this by working together.’

Saying it with data

Perhaps, one of the most effective ways of steering people back onto the path of righteousness is with data. Former GCS head Alex Aiken would make the point correctly that to have the most amount of data in the room is the position comms should aim for.

Bring in the data that can help guide the decision making. I’ve long been an advocate for bringing together data in one page for your area. This came from an experience in local government when social media was evolving. We brought together population data, newspaper sales and social media use and gave it to a designer. They came back with an infographic that showed we knew what we were talking about but also took the sting out of confrontation. How? Because we could all look at the data.

‘Yes, let’s look at the data to see what that says. The Edelman Trust Barometer says that people like me are the most trusted group of people. Who is the audience we are trying gto reach so we know who to reflect back at them in the content…’

Tapping into their motivation

If you get to know your senior people you can start to know what makes them tick. So, the executive director who is risk averse can be won around by pointing out the risky consequences of doing nothing or taking that particular course of action.

‘We can do this, but I need to set out the risks involved…’

Asking what happens if we do nothing

With the situation at an impasse, the temptation may be for them to sit on their hands a while and put off making a decision. Asking what the consequences may be of doing nothing may start you both to map out the impact of inaction.

If you do nothing about AI, you may get sidelined, your skills will fall behind the expected level and you’ll find it difficult to find new work. So, doing nothing is a far riskier scenario than doing something. This can be the rocket fuel to move things forward.

‘What happens if we do nothing…?’

But the [insert name of senior person] wants it

We’ve all had it. The tactics rather than the plan or the conversation. 

‘Can we just check what the [insert name of senior person] wants to achieve from this…?

‘I would not want to give that senior person the wrong advice…’

But they hold the budget 

They hold the budget so think they can click their fingers to demand posters. This is a particularly patronising approach to be on the receiving end of.

‘I would not want to give the wrong advice to you as budget holder who would be accountable for the effectiveness of this spend…’

This can also need to this…

Create a barricade 

Once, when a colleague was being pressed to do something they thought was unethical they asked for help. Before the crunch meeting I needed to be sure of my ground. I read through the organisation’s constitution to look for places where the constitution backed me up. I further backed this up by tracking down policies the organisation had agreed. I didn’t have to say ‘no’. I had created a barricade that would have stopped a Sherman tank in its tracks. It w2asn’t me saying ‘no’ it was the constitution.

This then allows you to introduce an alternative scenario which leads you all away from danger. 

‘I’d love to but the constitution says this…’

Professionalise it 

From time to time the pressure may be to take a course of action that is unethical. Quoting the CIPR Code of Conduct in extreme circumstances is sometimes a useful reminder that you are professional too. 

‘I’m afraid, I couldn’t be associated with this, this breaches my professional code of conduct.’

Set out the advice in writing 

You’ve had the conversation and you’ve maybe set out your thoughts. Re-summarise them in writing for the benefit of clarity and posterity. This avoids history being re-written in the future.

‘In my professional opinion…’

‘In my respectful submission…’

‘If this situation was to escalate, I need to be clear in the advice that I’m offering…’

Make sure the head of comms has your back 

All this sounds great in theory and as you go through your career this can get easier. But those at the start of their career need the back-up of senior people. If you are a manager or a head of comms you need to deploy that gold braid to support your staff. 

Give them the confidence that you’ve got their back. 

Remember, you are giving advice 

Of course, we are only giving advice. There may be hills to die on and this one may not be your hill.

I can recall having a very vivid thought when I was offering advice. I am on the touchline, and I’m shouting to our centre-forward that there’s an easy goal if they just side-foot it into the empty net. Most people would take that advice but occasionally, they would score an own goal instead. That’s on them. You’ve given the advice you can. What happens next is not on you it’s on them.

Big thanks to people who attended the commscamp Scotland session.

I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.

Picture credit: ‘Llandudno’ By Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9231772