Lincolnshire Reporter
Lincolnshire Reporter is an independent online news service covering Lincoln and the wider county of Lincolnshire, published at lincolnshirereporter.co.uk. Produced by Lincoln-based Stonebow Media, the publisher behind The Lincolnite, it was created to do for the whole of Greater Lincolnshire what its sister title did for the city: provide a daily, digital-first source of local news, jobs, events and property information. Its own app description summed up the ambition plainly, presenting it as the news source for the Greater Lincolnshire area from the Humber to the Wash — a sweep that runs from the industrial towns of the Humber estuary, through Lincoln and the market towns of the Wolds and Fens, to the North Sea coast. With breaking-news alerts, offline reading and reader discussion built into its mobile apps, Lincolnshire Reporter belongs to the generation of independent titles built for the phone in the reader’s pocket rather than the printed page.
A sister title to The Lincolnite
Lincolnshire Reporter cannot be understood apart from The Lincolnite, Stonebow Media’s flagship brand. The Lincolnite was founded in 2010 by Daniel Ionescu, who became its founding editor and managing editor of both titles, and it grew into Lincoln’s best-known independent online news source, described by its publisher as the city’s top source of news. Council communications officers in Lincoln noted as early as 2012 that the new online title had arrived with a clear growth strategy: break news first, cover the city thoroughly, report its social life — bars, restaurants, theatres, shows and festivals — invest in search visibility and use strong photography, including its own photographer. Lincolnshire Reporter applied that same playbook at county scale, carrying the publisher’s reporting, jobs board and property pages to readers well beyond the city boundary.
Coverage from the Humber to the Wash
Lincolnshire is one of England’s largest and most rural counties, and its communities are spread across distinct districts with strong local identities. Lincolnshire Reporter’s remit, as set out by Stonebow Media, was the whole Greater Lincolnshire area — from the Humber in the north to the Wash in the south. That patch includes the city of Lincoln, coastal resorts, agricultural market towns and villages across the Fens and Wolds. The site’s strapline promised Lincoln news and Greater Lincolnshire headlines alongside local jobs, events and property, and its published output ranged across news, sport and what’s-on coverage. For readers in smaller communities that no longer sustained a dedicated local newsroom, a county-wide digital title offered a way to follow planning, policing, council and community stories in one place.
The Lincolnshire Reporter app
Mobile distribution was central to the title’s model. The Lincolnshire Reporter app, developed by Stonebow Media Limited, offered readers push notifications for breaking news, traffic updates and the sections they chose to follow, so that important county stories could reach people immediately rather than waiting for a homepage visit. It supported offline reading through background story syncing, a practical feature in a rural county where connectivity can be patchy, and it included a comments section intended to let readers join the discussion and have their say. Listings for the app put its size at around 23 MB and recorded a free download model supported by the publisher’s wider commercial operation. Later, The Lincolnite app was described as incorporating Lincolnshire Reporter, bringing the two brands together in a single mobile home with the same alerts, job board and property pages.
Stonebow Media and Daniel Ionescu
Stonebow Media, based in Lincoln, is the independent company behind both titles, with Daniel Ionescu as director and managing editor. Ionescu’s background combines technology writing, including work for PC World, with student journalism as editor-in-chief of The Linc, and his career at Stonebow has been closely watched by the regional press trade. Industry publication HoldtheFrontPage reported in 2022 that Ionescu, having founded the hyperlocal business twelve years earlier, was recruiting a new editor or content manager to lead The Lincolnite day to day while he stepped back to pursue expansion plans for Stonebow Media. The newsroom’s profile was underlined the same year when the editorial team hosted a visit from the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who took part in a question-and-answer session with readers’ questions — an unusual honour for an independent digital publisher.
Jobs, property and practical information
Like many successful digital local titles, Lincolnshire Reporter treated news as only part of its value. Its jobs board, property pages and events listings gave readers reasons to return even on quiet news days, and gave local employers, estate agents and venues a targeted place to reach a Lincolnshire audience. The combination mirrors the strategy that built The Lincolnite: be first with breaking stories, but also be useful — a diary, a marketplace and a community noticeboard as well as a newspaper. Social channels on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram extended that usefulness, pushing stories and listings to followers where they already spent their time and drawing them back to the site and app for the full report.
From Reporter to MyLocal
In May 2023 Stonebow Media launched MyLocal, a web and app platform presented as the new online home of its content and the next generation of independent media platform. HoldtheFrontPage reported that MyLocal allowed readers to take out memberships to support The Lincolnite’s journalists and content partners, launching with a free three-month trial, and that the publisher hoped other independent publishers would join the platform. Ionescu argued that memberships were the key to sustaining independent news reporting in Lincolnshire and beyond, with a blend of members-only and free-access stories across app and website, and content drawn both from the Lincoln newsroom and from trusted sources such as the police, councils and national providers. Lincolnshire Reporter’s county audience and brand were part of the foundation on which that membership experiment was built.
Innovation beyond the newsroom
Stonebow’s experimentation continued in 2024, when MyLocal and The Lincolnite introduced PromoAI, a tool designed to let local businesses create advertising campaigns — including ad copy and calls to action — regardless of their marketing expertise. Ionescu said the aim was to make artificial intelligence accessible and affordable for small and medium-sized businesses in Lincolnshire. The launch illustrates the economic logic behind titles such as Lincolnshire Reporter: in a market where large platforms dominate digital advertising, independent publishers have to build their own tools and revenue relationships with local firms if local reporting is to pay for itself. Reader memberships, local advertising technology and practical services such as jobs and property are all parts of that same sustainability puzzle.
Lincolnshire Reporter’s place in county media
Lincolnshire’s media landscape has long mixed county-wide BBC services, long-established newspaper brands that have moved online, and a new tier of independent digital publishers. Lincolnshire Reporter belongs firmly to that new tier: born digital, app-led, county-wide in ambition and produced by a small independent team in Lincoln rather than a national group. Industry directories list its scope as business, general assignment news, real estate and regional news in English from its Lincoln base, and audience measurement cited by media databases recorded tens of thousands of visits in a typical month. Its significance lies less in any single story than in the model it represents — proof that a county as dispersed as Lincolnshire can be served by an independent online newsroom organised around alerts, search, social distribution and reader support.
Lincolnshire Reporter today
Lincolnshire Reporter’s brand, audience and county remit live on within Stonebow Media’s publishing operation, incorporated into The Lincolnite’s app presence and the MyLocal platform that now fronts the publisher’s membership-based future. The title’s founding proposition remains the one set out in its earliest app listings: a daily fix of local news for Greater Lincolnshire from the publishers of Lincoln’s leading independent news source, from the Humber to the Wash. For readers across the county, and for observers of Britain’s changing local media, Lincolnshire Reporter stands as an early example of how an independent city newsroom tried to scale its journalism to a whole county — and then to reinvent how that journalism is funded.
