February 2026 editions of Social Spider newspapers Waltham Forest Echo, Enfield Dispatch, Barnet Post and Newham Voices. Picture: Press Gazette
The publisher of four London local newspapers is expecting to be profitable for the second year running in 2026.
But David Floyd, managing director of Social Spider CIC, said it had been “a real challenge” to get to that point in London’s “tough market” for local news.
Social Spider, a social enterprise, publishes monthly print newspapers the Waltham Forest Echo (launched in 2014), Enfield Dispatch (2018), Barnet Post (2021) and Newham Voices (launched independently in 2020 but published by Social Spider since 2023).
Online it also publishes Haringey Community Press (originally launched as Tottenham Community Press in 2016 but closed in print in 2024), Clerkenwell news website EC1 Echo (2019) in partnership with local charity The Peel, and the newly-launched Barking and Dagenham Star.
Social Spider previously produced the magazine One in Four, written by and for people with mental health difficulties, between 2007 and 2014 when Floyd said they realised “there was an unmet need in local news, particularly at that point in the London borough of Waltham Forest where we were initially based for a long time”.
The Waltham Forest Echo, Enfield Dispatch and Barnet Post distribute 15,000 copies each in street bins, libraries and community venues, while Newham Voices distributes 12,500. “For us, the mass circulation element of it is important,” Floyd said.
Social Spider recorded a pre-tax profit of £30,495 in the last financial year to 31 July 2025 and is expecting to again make a profit this year, Floyd told Press Gazette. This was an increase from a loss before tax of £22,475 in the year to 31 July 2024.
As it is a not-for-profit social enterprise, any surplus goes directly back into the journalism. Social Spider is a community interest company, which means it is a limited company with social objectives that aims to benefit the community rather than private shareholders.
Floyd said: “It’s a fairly good time right now, but it’s been a real challenge to get to where we are.”
He said “in some ways” they were lucky because they entered the local news market after its challenges had already begun, meaning they were “not in a position of thinking, oh, you know, where’s all that lovely money gone? Because we never had it.”
Instead, he said, “we’ve always been in a position of how can we maximise the resources for local news in a very difficult market situation?”
Social Spider gradually transitioned from its other work to exclusively being a newspaper publisher. “Making that work financially to get to that point where the business could pay for itself entirely through local news activity has been a slog,” Floyd said.
He added that the organisation has incurred debts in the process of getting to this point.
Floyd described London as “a tough market, but an exciting and rewarding one” where “nuts and bolts public interest reporting… is poorly resourced”.
He praised other independent London news providers “doing a good job” such as Camden New Journal , Hackney Citizen and Southwark News.
But he said there are “20 or so boroughs where you have legacy media titles who are not delivering any on the ground journalism at all – and that’s not to to slag off corporate groups. I understand why the market has forced them into that position.”
Floyd said the “need for public interest news is there in London in the way that it is in the rest of the country”, referring to scrutiny of borough councils and other authorities, but the challenge is “the affinity that people have with areas in London is not necessarily the same as it is in other parts of the country”. This also affects potential advertisers, he added.
Print advertising remains Social Spider’s biggest single source of revenue, making up around half each month.
The second biggest income stream is donations from supporters making up around 20%. Currently around 850 people pay an average of £5 per month to support the papers under a Guardian-style model.
The newsbrands are free to read in print and online but Floyd characterised it as “a donation in support of the publications existing” (although almost half of the supporters choose to receive a print newspaper in the post as part of their payment).
Other income streams include ongoing Google News Showcase funding , a small amount of online advertising, and the Local Democracy Reporting Service through which the BBC basically covers the cost for Social Spider to employ three journalists.
Floyd feels that the LDR scheme is “heavily under-resourced in London. Our Barnet, Enfield Haringey reporter covers a population of around a million people, whereas in other parts of the country you have reporters covering a single council. Not that I’m calling for other parts of the country to have less resources, but I am calling for London to have more.”
Floyd added: “Ultimately, it doesn’t benefit the rest of the country for London to be that poorly scrutinised.”
Social Spider launched the Barking and Dagenham Star in February so it can fully utilise the reporting done by its LDR for Newham, Tower Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham. Nick Clark’s stories about the latter area were going unpublished as Social Spider did not have a publication covering the area and other newsbrands were often not picking them up from the free LDR feed.
Social Spider has a “small and nimble” team of three editorial staff plus the LDRs.
They include editor-in-chief James Cracknell, who mainly edits the Enfield Dispatch as well as the online Haringey Community Press and Barking and Dagenham Star, Waltham Forest Echo editor Marco Marcelline, and Floyd as publisher. They have two designers working across the papers. In total, according to Companies House, the company had 11 employees on average in the 2024 financial year.
The editors work with many contributors, mostly volunteers in the local areas.
Floyd said: “We want to have more people who we can pay to do journalism but that’s the challenge of finding resources to do that.”
When announcing the Barking and Dagenham Star launch, Social Spider said: “We hope to develop the Star gradually from this starting point to provide more local journalism for Barking and Dagenham as resources allow.”
Floyd said the next step would be to create more content internally, then try to get supporters in. If 200 people sign up, bringing in £1,000 per month, that would enable a local journalist to be paid for one to one-and-a-half days each week.
Floyd added that in London “you could have a really transformative impact with quite a small amount of money… £50,000 a year in a London borough could absolutely transform what’s going on in terms of journalism.
“It’s a really solvable problem in terms of getting things to a level where things are better.”
Floyd said there could be more funding made available to support on-the-ground local news but added: “There’s a difficulty in terms of a permanent state subsidy model, because I think journalism is an industry that does need to be independent of the state or you have a problem.”
Public notices system ‘works particularly badly in London’
Floyd noted that there are already subsidies in the system, most notably public notices for which local authorities pay newspapers to publish information about planning, traffic and licensing applications and updates.
But he said this system “works particularly badly” in London: “This is not a criticism of the sort of morality or intentions of corporate groups, but the incentive is to publish a weekly newspaper irrespective of whether that contains any original journalism content or not, and irrespective of whether anyone is reading it.
“There’s a couple of boroughs in London where the legacy corporate newspapers have circulations of significantly under 1,000 in boroughs with populations of 250-300,000. They have no on the ground journalism activity other than publishing some LDR content, and they receive the public notice contract for that borough which could be worth £60,000, £80,000, £100,000 in some cases.
“You could do a lot with that money and that money is going out there. But currently it’s not getting the information about public notices out there for people to read them. So it’s not fulfilling that democratic function. It’s not subsidising journalism. It’s subsidising the production of a weekly newspaper read by a vanishingly small number of people. So it’s an arbitrary and entirely pointless situation.”
Social Spider benefits from advertising for new premises licences but is unable to win public notice contracts because its print publications are published too infrequently to meet the requirements.
Floyd described it as a “chicken and egg” situation “because there isn’t any way to fund a high quality publication in London every week without a public notice contract. There just isn’t enough advertising. So we can’t get the public notice contracts because we’re not published regularly enough. We can’t publish regularly enough because we don’t have the public notice contracts.”
He said it would be necessary to start “with a big chunk of money to burn” in order to get off the ground and win the contracts but that Social Spider is operating in a “reasonably frugal way”.
Floyd also questioned whether it would be a sustainable model for a newspaper to rely on a council for a large chunk of its income. “If you lose the contract, or the system changes, then suddenly you have to stop [publishing] again.”
Despite the challenges Floyd feels there is “still a big role for print. Monthly print publications are really important and really valued, both by readers and by advertisers, but to do it weekly, I’m not sure the market is really there without public notices. But if the public notices could go into monthly publications, it would massively increase our ability to do more journalism.”
Print advertising still has a “much higher value” than online advertising, Floyd said.
“We’re committed to having borough level brands and building that relationship with local readers at a borough level, and there isn’t any way at a borough level that you could ever generate the same level of advertising income online.”
Print can also drive higher awareness of a newsbrand, he added: “Even in terms of driving online readership, our online readership is bigger in the areas where we also have a print publication.”
He continued: “Having a physical presence in the community is important. I think it’s important people see a paper, pick it up and get a curated view of what’s going on in their local area.”
Major stories can get a much wider readership online, Floyd said, but many community stories will not – people “talking about their experience of challenges they’re facing, helping people to understand what the area they live in is like, and who lives there, and what they’re doing that’s positive, what they’re going through that’s difficult.
“I think you get that from a print publication in the way that you don’t from a situation where you’re driven by social media to the biggest and most shocking stories.”
Editorially Floyd said he is most proud of Social Spider for “plugging away at the detail that other people are not in a position to cover”. He cited Enfield Dispatch editor-in-chief James Cracknell’s work on the borough’s Local Plan preparations last year which he said has been “massively valued by local people” and led to a “big spike” in supporter sign-ups.
“There is a real interest in it but clearly it was not clickbait. It’s a particular kind of quite dogged journalism.”
He also cited stories that see journalists “getting out into the community and talking to people”, such as Waltham Forest Echo editor Marco Marcelline’s work on people having problems with housing, as well as positive stories.
Overall Floyd said: “From our point of view, with a bit more resource, we could do a lot more and it’s a frustration in London that things are as bad as they are, and I’d really like them to be better. Hopefully, alongside others, we can find a way of making them better over the coming years.”
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