There is a version of local news that most people recognise. Court reports, a closed shop, a fly-tipping photo, an argument in the comments. It is not untrue. It is just relentlessly partial, and after a decade of it a lot of people quietly stopped reading.
We started Firefly on the opposite bet. Not that bad news should be hidden, but that the good things happening in a town are genuinely newsworthy and almost nobody is covering them properly. The community garden that finally opened. The employer taking on twelve apprentices. The charity that hit its target. These are real stories with real local consequence, and they were falling through the floor.
What that looks like in practice
It means a nursery open day gets covered like an event, not an advert. It means a business milestone is told through the people who built it. It means we say no to content whose only purpose is a backlink, because publishing that is how a local title loses the thing that made it worth reading.
It also means we are explicit about the line. Our content guidelines set out what we publish and what we do not, and they apply to everyone, including us.
Not a soft option
Positive is not the same as uncritical. A story still has to answer who, what, where, when and why it matters. Claims still have to be checkable. What changes is the starting question: instead of asking what has gone wrong here, we ask what is worth knowing.
That question turns out to have a lot of answers. Across the network we now publish in more than 170 local titles, and the limiting factor has never been finding good stories. It is finding the time to tell them.
Where this goes
We want local to become the place people go for good news rather than the place they brace themselves for. That is a long project and we are some way into it. If you have a story from your town, send it to us.