The Kent Current is an independent news website and newsletter for the county of Kent, launched in April 2025 by the team behind the award-winning Medway news publication Local Authority. Published by Authority Media and edited by Ed Jennings, it covers Kent news, politics and culture with a focus on serious, sustained reporting on local democracy — particularly Kent County Council, which came under the control of Reform UK in 2025. Reader-funded and regulated by the press regulator Impress, it had gathered nearly 2,000 subscribers within its first year and marked its first anniversary in April 2026.
Launch: a second title for the Local Authority team
The Kent Current was announced in April 2025 by HoldtheFrontPage, the journalism industry news site, which reported that "a new independent website for Kent is to be launched this month by the team responsible for another local online title". That title was Local Authority, the Medway news website founded by Ed Jennings and Steven Keevil in 2021, which had spent four years covering news, politics, culture and "the weirder side of the Medway Towns". With Local Authority established as one of Kent's leading independent news organisations, the team decided it was in a position to launch a second title looking across the whole county.
Announcing the launch, editor Ed Jennings wrote: "The Kent Current is a new, independent news website for Kent. We believe local journalism is important, but local newsrooms are struggling following years of cuts and a collapse in advertising revenue." The pitch was familiar from the Local Authority playbook: "We do things differently here. We have no corporate overlords, we don't run advertising, and we don't resort to clickbait. Our model is entirely reader-funded." Readers were invited to pledge support before launch — a way of gauging how many might pay — with the paywall to be switched on only once publishing began. The first edition, headlined "Kent County Council prepares for its final election", set the tone: thoughtful, county-level journalism, "accessible without having to navigate around a wall of annoying adverts".
What it covers
The Kent Current covers news, politics and culture across the county of Kent — one of England's largest and most complex local-government areas, with Kent County Council, twelve district and borough councils, and the unitary Medway Council all operating within or alongside it. Its stated aim is to "take county-level local democracy seriously, explain complicated issues clearly, and show up consistently, especially when the story is uncomfortable, technical, or unfolding slowly". In practice that means spending time with council documents, sitting through meetings, asking follow-up questions, and explaining not just what has happened but why it matters.
The publishing rhythm settled into roughly two editions a week for free subscribers: a Monday briefing — "a clear roundup of the Kent stories worth knowing, with context, useful links, planning, culture and events from across the county" — and a Thursday big story, "one substantial piece of original reporting or analysis that goes beyond the day's headlines". Longer investigations, interviews with significant county figures, and arts and culture features appear alongside the regular editions, with additional content reserved for paying supporters.
The Reform takeover of Kent County Council
The defining story of the Kent Current's first year was the political earthquake of 2025: Reform UK's takeover of Kent County Council. The Current published detailed analysis of the election result itself and then stayed with the story as events unfolded at County Hall — following council meetings closely, reading internal papers, and tracking how decisions translated into practice. As the publication put it in its first-anniversary review, the interesting part was never just the election result: it was "how power was exercised, how the culture of County Hall began to shift, how scrutiny held up under pressure, and what happened when a council long used to operating one way suddenly found itself in a very different political moment".
The coverage produced genuine scoops. The Current broke the story about five Reform councillors posing for photographs with a man draped in a neo-Nazi flag — a story, it noted, that other outlets chose not to pursue. It was exactly the kind of uncomfortable, slow-moving story the publication was founded to cover: one that required persistence rather than speed, and that demonstrated the value of having reporters who treat county politics as worth understanding properly rather than as a sideshow to Westminster.
The reader-funded model
The Kent Current's business model is the same one that sustained Local Authority: independent, reader-funded journalism with no advertising and no clickbait. Most of what it publishes is available free to everyone; readers who choose to support it financially fund the work while receiving additional editions, investigations and interviews. At launch the team promised that "while our core news briefings are free, we put some additional content behind a paywall. As a result, those who can support our work get a little extra while keeping the main editions free for everyone."
The model reflects a deliberate philosophy about local news. As Jennings wrote at launch, the team believes "there is room for more thoughtful journalism that is accessible without having to navigate around a wall of annoying adverts to read it". By relying on readers rather than advertisers or traffic targets, the Current buys itself the time to report stories properly — to sit through the meetings, read the documents and ask the follow-up questions that the advertising-driven model, with its demand for volume, increasingly cannot afford. By its first anniversary, thousands of readers subscribed by email and thousands more read the work on the web — "for something that only launched a year ago, that feels significant", as the anniversary edition put it.
Regulation and standards
The Kent Current is regulated by Impress, the independent press regulator, and is a member of the Public Interest News Foundation — two affiliations that signal its commitment to accurate, accountable public-interest journalism. Impress regulation means the publication adheres to a published standards code and offers readers a route of redress; membership of the Public Interest News Foundation places it within a network of independent publishers committed to serving their communities. For a small, young publication, these are meaningful commitments: they hold the Current to the same standards framework as far larger news organisations and give readers reason to trust a title they may never have heard of.
The publication's reader testimonials underline the point. Patrick Cockburn of The i called it "Excellent"; writer James O'Malley described it as "a new, quality news outlet for the county that is well worth supporting if you live here"; and Medway councillor Adrian Gulvin praised its "in-depth reporting of local issues", adding that "it's great to hear from reporters who feel the same but give the news as it is, both good and bad".
Authority Media: the publisher
The Kent Current is published by Authority Media, the company behind both it and Local Authority. The publisher describes itself as a small organisation — "at heart, two people trying to cover a very large and often unruly county" — in which the people it works with have real influence and there are no layers of management. It built both publications from scratch, supported by readers and local organisations that believe their communities deserve serious, independent journalism, and has brought in freelance and specialist help to make the work more sustainable. The launch of the Kent Current just four years after Local Authority shows the model scaling: from one Medway title reaching 45,000 readers a month to a two-publication operation covering the whole county.
The first year in review
In its end-of-first-year review, the Kent Current looked back on what it had reported since the April 2025 launch and where it was heading. Beyond the Reform story, its reporting had ranged across the pressures facing the county: the Kent and Medway NHS system's struggles with discharge delays, access to primary care and mental health provision; the costs councils absorb through social care when hospitals cannot move patients on; and the overlay of local government reorganisation — the government's plan to replace Kent's existing councils with four new unitaries, a plan that was confirmed in July 2026 and then suddenly paused less than two months later. The Current's anniversary edition argued that the promise made at launch — to take county reporting seriously, make sense of County Hall, and stick with stories that are easy to ignore because they are slow-moving, technical or uncomfortable — had held up.
Kent's media landscape
The Kent Current entered a county media landscape dominated by Reach-owned titles and a scattering of smaller independents. Its distinctive contribution is depth: where much county coverage is reactive, the Current's proposition is sustained attention — returning to the same institutions week after week, building the documentary record, and joining the dots across council boundaries rather than treating every part of Kent in isolation. Its "Kent in context" strand explicitly reports on how decisions in one part of the county affect another, a perspective that the fragmented structure of Kent local government makes especially valuable. In a county where the biggest political story in decades was unfolding at County Hall, the Current positioned itself as the publication doing the unglamorous work of watching it happen.
How to read it
The Kent Current is published at kentcurrent.news, where readers can subscribe for free to receive the Monday briefing and the Thursday big story by email, and browse the archive of investigations, interviews and features. Those who want to support the journalism can become paying supporters, unlocking additional editions and helping keep the core briefings free for everyone. For Kent residents who want to understand what is happening at County Hall and across their county — calmly, seriously and without clickbait — the Current offers something the county has long lacked: a dedicated, independent watcher of Kent's local democracy.
