I’m not sure what I was expecting of Mill Media’s HQ: en route to Manchester, where the business is based, I vaguely picture people frantically hot-desking in a WeWork-style shared space. But whatever was in my mind, it’s nothing like the reality. The digital publisher of local news whose cheerleaders include Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker, and Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN, has made its home high in the roof of the magnificent Royal Exchange, in a trio of rooms, little wider than corridors, that contain not one bit of boring, Scandinavian-inflected office furniture. Staff here joke that Joshi Herrmann, the company’s charismatic founder, is as good at interior design as he is at journalism, and in a single glance you can see why. Squashy sofas, battered dark wood desks, standard lamps with tasselled shades: he bought them all himself, secondhand, on Facebook Marketplace.
Herrmann, who’s in his mid-30s, takes me into the third of the rooms, where we sit in two old-fashioned armchairs beside a bureau on which there’s a manual typewriter. Is it just for show or does he use it? “I do use it, yes,” he says, with a rueful smile. “I’ve got three of them.” A typewriter, he tells me, is useful when he’s trying to come up with ideas: “It slows you down and, once you’ve started [to write], you can’t go back. It kind of focuses you.” But perhaps, too, such a machine is akin to a totem here: a symbol of Mill Media’s singular identity. For while his company, which is barely four years old, is very much a new media business – there is no paper product; readers receive content via a Substack newsletter – in some other ways, it could not be more quaint if it tried.
