Great Central Gazette
The Great Central Gazette was the original name of an independent, co-operatively owned newspaper serving Leicester and Leicestershire in the East Midlands of England. Launched online in March 2023, it published investigative journalism, features and news reports for the city of Leicester, presenting itself from the outset as an alternative to the established, commercially owned local press. In September 2024 the publication was renamed the Leicester Gazette, the title under which it continues, so this profile uses the name under which it was founded and first became known, while recording the later change of name as part of its history.
The Gazette is notable within British local journalism less for its size than for its structure. It was set up as a multi-stakeholder co-operative, owned by its workers and its readers rather than by a proprietor or a publishing group, and funded principally by members paying a monthly or annual fee. That model, consciously borrowed from earlier reader-owned titles, shaped everything about the project: its slow, long-form editorial approach, its refusal of intrusive advertising at launch, its community workshops, and its stated aim of reporting with the community it serves rather than simply about it.
Origins and planning
Planning for the Gazette began in 2022. Leicester, like many British cities, was by then served principally by a single legacy news organisation, the Reach plc-owned Leicester Mercury and its website, Leicestershire Live. The founders argued that this concentration, and the advertising-driven economics that came with it, left many communities poorly represented and public power insufficiently scrutinised. Their answer was a not-for-profit newsroom that readers themselves would own.
A crowdfunding campaign raised an initial sum to build the website and fund community activity, and a small grant from Central England Co-operative helped the project towards launch. The founders spent roughly a year preparing a sustainable framework before publishing, a period of preparation they later recommended to others attempting similar ventures: assembling a like-minded team, registering the co-operative society and securing membership income before the journalism began in earnest. The co-operative was registered in January 2023, and the website went live at the end of March that year, with early coverage given a focus on the forthcoming local elections.
Founders and background
The Gazette was founded by three Leicester journalists, Reece Stafferton, Emma Guy and Megan Lupton, all graduates of De Montfort University in the city. Stafferton had studied investigative journalism at the university and had previously tested the local market with a subscription newsletter, the Leicester Citizen, an experience that informed the Gazette's emphasis on investigations and features over high-volume news. Guy brought an emphasis on accessibility and inclusion, and Lupton completed the founding team that ran the title from launch.
The De Montfort connection continued after launch. The university was among the project's funders, including support for a solutions-focused environment campaign, which situated the young newsroom within Leicester's academic as well as civic life. The founders were volunteers with other commitments in the project's earliest phase, a common pattern among independent start-ups, and the co-operative structure was intended in part to distribute ownership and responsibility beyond a single proprietor.
The name
The original title paid homage to the Great Central Railway, the historic line that once ran through Leicester and which survives in part as a heritage railway between Leicester and Loughborough. The choice linked a brand-new digital publication to a well-loved piece of the city's industrial and transport history. When the publication renamed itself in 2024, the founders explained that the new, simpler title described more plainly the people it served across both city and county, and the railway name was retired with a published farewell.
Launch funding and grants
Beyond the crowdfunder, which raised more than its modest initial target, the Gazette assembled a patchwork of small grants typical of the independent sector. Central Co-op contributed towards general costs, De Montfort University supported set-up and environmental coverage, the Lush Charity Pot funded human rights and media literacy workshops, and the Scurrah Wainwright Charity, which backs projects concerned with social reform, supported coverage of the local elections. Later funders recorded for the co-operative include the Midcounties Co-operative. None of these sums was large in itself; together they underpinned a launch that membership income alone could not yet sustain.
An early and distinctive investment was in accessibility. The Gazette adopted a tool that made its articles easier to read and translatable into around one hundred languages, among them Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Polish and Arabic, languages widely spoken in Leicester. For a publication claiming to serve the whole city, that choice was practical as well as symbolic: Leicester is one of England's most diverse cities, and a community-owned paper that many residents could not read would have contradicted its own founding argument.
The co-operative model
The Gazette is a multi-stakeholder co-operative whose members are its readers and its journalists. Anyone in the local community could become a reader member, initially for a minimum of a few pounds a month, with free membership available to those who could not afford to pay. Members gained a say in how the organisation was run, and the model followed the precedent of The Bristol Cable, the membership-owned Bristol title launched in 2014, adapted to Leicester.
Membership was editorial as well as financial. The founders described the community as a body of experts: a member with professional knowledge of a subject, such as policing, could be drawn on when the newsroom reported on that subject. Members could be involved in the editorial process and in reporting itself, blurring the conventional line between newsroom and audience. The co-operative is a member of Co-operatives UK and of sector bodies including the press regulator Impress, the Independent Community News Network, the Independent Media Association and Social Enterprise UK, and it has taken part in the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the scheme that funds reporters to cover councils and other public bodies.
Editorial approach
Editorially, the Gazette positioned itself against what its founders characterised as click-driven local news: high volumes of quickly produced stories, sensational headlines and pages crowded with advertising. In their place it promised slower, carefully produced journalism, investigations, features and news reports developed with sensitivity rather than speed. At launch it was advertising-free and funded by its members, an arrangement presented as protection for editorial independence as much as a business decision.
The public-interest emphasis was visible from the first weeks, when grant funding supported dedicated coverage of the local elections. The founders also pledged activity beyond the website itself, including journalism and media literacy workshops for local people and, in time, support for a wider network of hyperlocal titles across the city and a Leicester media awards scheme recognising local artists, filmmakers, writers and podcasters. Those ambitions placed the Gazette within a broader argument, made across the independent sector, that rebuilding local news requires rebuilding local media skills and institutions, not only publishing stories.
Rebrand to Leicester Gazette
In September 2024, eighteen months after launch, the publication rebranded as the Leicester Gazette, adopting a new domain, leicester.news, and a new logo depicting a wyvern, the mythical dragon-like creature found on buildings across the city, which the founders took as a symbol of protection, courage and perseverance in investigative work. The masthead described the title as Leicestershire's independent newspaper, reflecting an expanded remit beyond the city boundary into the surrounding county.
The rebrand was accompanied by changes in method. The Gazette adopted what it called a newsletter-first approach, reserving round-ups and behind-the-scenes material for subscribers rather than publishing everything to the open website, and it began offering digital services, including web design, search engine optimisation and public relations work, as an additional revenue stream alongside membership. Both moves are familiar survival strategies among small independent publishers: deepening the direct relationship with readers, and selling the newsroom's professional skills to subsidise the journalism.
Print edition and later development
Although it began as an online-only project, print was discussed from the early days, and a print launch was mooted well before it happened. In December 2025 the Leicester Gazette published its first print edition, a quarterly newspaper printed by Mortons Print in Lincolnshire, with five thousand free copies distributed through community centres, libraries, cafés and other venues across the city and county, and copies posted to members contributing above a set monthly level. The thirty-two-page edition was produced on half-Berliner newsprint, and its advertising, handled in partnership with an ethical advertising sales operation and restricted to local and ethical advertisers, was reported to have made a profit on the first issue, to be reinvested in future editions.
Membership figures published for the co-operative put membership at just over one hundred, modest in absolute terms but sufficient, with grants and services income, to sustain a small newsroom. In April 2026 the Gazette added a further platform, launching a news and social media application powered by Mastodon, the decentralised social network, extending its preference for community-owned infrastructure from its own governance to its means of distribution.
Place in Leicester's media landscape
The Gazette entered a market that had begun to diversify after years of single-title dominance. The Leicester Mercury remained the city's legacy title under Reach plc, the weekly Leicester Times had been set up by the independent Pukaar Group, and Stafferton's own Leicester Citizen had preceded the Gazette as an experiment in reader-funded city journalism. Against that background, the Gazette's significance lies in its ownership experiment and in demonstrating that a co-operative newsroom could move from crowdfunding to a sustained online presence, a county-wide remit and ultimately a print edition.
Its story is also a useful record of how small British news start-ups are actually financed: a crowdfunder, cooperative development support, university and charity grants, member subscriptions, ethical advertising and bought-in digital services, assembled piece by piece. Whether under its railway-inspired founding name or its present one, the publication remains one of the clearest Leicester examples of the reader-owned model of local journalism that has developed in Britain over the past decade.
