Oliver Rouane-Williams invested £160k last year to launch Ipswich.co.uk, an Axios-inspired take on local news in the UK.

His vision was to break away from the status quo of page view-driven advertising models that dominate the local news industry. Instead, he saw an opportunity to forge paid partnerships with local businesses to support positive, community journalism.

Journalism.co.uk checks in with founder Rouane-Williams eight months in to discuss his first (and unusual) hires, the development of his business model and whether he will stop doing 100-hour weeks anytime soon.

Responses have been edited for brevity.

Q: How is business so far?

It is going as well as I reasonably could have hoped.

We went from literally zero visitors in August 2024, to 55,000 visitors in our third month. And since then, we have maintained that. So we are in our eighth month currently.

January was our best month yet when we had 73,000 visitors to the site. But we have not had a month with less than 55,000 visitors after three months, so we cannot complain.

Q: Ipswich football club returned to the Premier League this season. Did that help?

Not at all - I considered leading with sport, but chose to lead with news and everything else instead. But we do very little on football. We get about 100 visits a week maybe on football. We have two guest writers, neither professional journalists, who go to games and write pieces. But no, we have not been able to piggyback on Ipswich football club's Premier League return.

Q: What does resonate with your readers, then?

We try to make sure that around 60 to 70 per cent of what we put out is positive content, and we break topics down into four areas.

One is challenging the public sector - we have done a lot around devolution of power. We recently had a heated exchange between the Suffolk County Council trying to take back control of library services and the charity that's run them for the last 12 years.

The second is around strengthening civic pride. We try to champion people and organisations within the town, and challenge people's perceptions of Ipswich. So that's been a key focus.

Then there is what we call accelerating the private sector and amplifying the non-profit sector. So working with local businesses to grow our private sector and community impact. And we do a lot of stories around organisations that are tackling important local issues, like social mobility and unemployment, through to homelessness and poverty.

Q: What do readers think of your Axios-inspired writing style, with lots of bullet points and summaries?

It was a gamble that paid off. We have yet to have a single piece of negative feedback and we have had between 200 and 300 people write in to say how much they enjoy the structure of our reporting.

I did not expect that four autistic people would........

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