👋 Become a paid member of Cornwall Football today
👋 Become a paid member of Cornwall Football today
For just £5 per month — or £50 per year — you will receive full access to an unrivalled and unprecedented level of coverage of football in Cornwall.
Good morning, readers!
The 2023/24 football season gets under way this weekend (yes, it is still July…) with the Western League kicking things off on Saturday.
To mark the imminent arrival of the new campaign, we are delighted to say that our brand-new paid subscription service — our bid to take local sports journalism to the next level — officially launches today!
We’re increasing our local football coverage this season and doubling the number of posts per week from two to four, and you’ll be able to access it all through our new service.
For just £5 per month — or £50 per year — you will receive full access to an unrivalled and unprecedented level of coverage of football in Cornwall.
To mark this launch, we’ll be releasing a four-part series of season previews this week which will be completely free-to-read — giving you a taste of the kind of coverage you’ll only get from us this season.
We will always provide a certain amount of coverage for free, but we can only continue to publish this newsletter if enough people are willing to pay for it. Every subscription gets us closer to achieving that goal and making this a staple of independent local sports coverage.
What's in a paid subscription?
This season, we are taking local football coverage to a level not seen before, with four posts per week dedicated to the beautiful game in Cornwall.
For just £5 per month, or £50 for 12 months, you will receive full access to all four of our posts each week.
We will be publishing the newsletter every:
Sunday PM
Tuesday AM
Thursday PM
Friday AM
Free subscribers will receive full access to our posts on Sunday and Thursday as well as a preview of our two premium posts on Tuesday and Friday.
Why should I pay?
In the past two decades, local journalism in Cornwall and beyond has been utterly decimated. Not that long ago, newsrooms were filled with dozens of journalists producing quality newspapers that sold tens of thousands of copies, supported by advertising.
These days, newsrooms, which are increasingly remote from the communities they serve, are populated by journalists tasked with churning out click-bait stories to drive money through the annoying pop-up adverts that make most online journalism unreadable.
That has had a disastrous impact on the coverage of local sport. Cornwall used to have several full-time sports reporters. Now, most publications operate without a single sports reporter or photographer.
The print newspaper industry is in terminal decline. The West Briton sold more than 30,000 copies a week back in 2012. Last year, they sold just 4,800 — a decline of more than 85 percent. Other weeklies such as the Cornish Times, The Cornishman and the Cornish Guardian saw their weekly sales fall by more than 20 percent in 2022 alone. The Sunday Independent has gone out of business altogether.
No wonder research showed earlier this year that just seven per cent of people in Britain aged 18-54 get their news from printed publications.
Some publishers have tried to replace declining print newspaper sales with websites and social media. The problem is that they still don’t have anybody to write about sport or photograph it.
The county’s two digital outlets, Cornwall Live and the Packet, don’t employ a single sports reporter between them. What little sports coverage they have is limited to whatever is spoon fed to them by local sports clubs, regardless of quality or news value.
That’s where we come in. Cornwall Football is a top quality local football publication, delivered via email. It’s a new way to make local sports journalism work: by relying on subscribers, not clicks.
With Cornwall Football, you won’t simply get whatever happens to drop into our email inbox or what we’re able to lift from club Twitter accounts; you’ll get quality, original journalism that you won’t find anywhere else.
We don’t just sit on the sofa and regurgitate other people’s social media posts. Our reporters go to matches, write reports and in-depth features, interview players and managers and photograph the action.
But that kind of quality journalism costs money. That's why we're launching paid subscriptions.
The hundreds of readers on our free mailing list have already seen what can be achieved by a dedicated team of local reporters. By buying a paid subscription you’re buying into our mission to solve the existential crisis that local sports journalism finds itself in, and supporting our commitment to providing the quality coverage that local sport deserves.
Since we launched our newsletters at the start of 2023, they have been opened and read more than 45,000 times — so clearly local sports fans value what we do.
Trust us, we’re not going to get rich from this, but we do have bills to pay. A small financial commitment from our readers will help to keep the lights on. And as you’ve probably noticed, nobody else is queuing up to give it a go after we’ve gone.
What coverage can I expect?
Paying subscribers will receive full access to all four of our posts every week, while free subscribers will receive full access to our posts on Sunday and Thursday and a preview of our two premium posts on Tuesday and Friday.
Our regular post from last season that rounded up the weekend action every Monday evening will undergo a makeover this year and be with you 24 hours earlier, arriving in your inboxes on Sunday evening instead.
Our midweek round-up post on Thursday will take a similar format, but will also include an exclusive feature story on a topic relevant to Cornish football.
Our paid posts on Tuesdays and Fridays will be the home of the bulk of our coverage and will be filled with content you simply won't find anywhere else.
Every weekend and midweek evening, you'll find at least one of us out and about at a touchline near you, and we'll be providing exclusive written and photographic content from those games.
But we won't just provide coverage of the games we were at, we'll have plenty of other interviews from around the grounds as we strive to give clubs from all corners of the county the coverage they have been lacking.
Grassroots football has undergone a makeover ahead of the coming season with all men's divisions now under the St Piran League banner, and we'll round up the best of the action in our Grassroots Review every Tuesday.
We'll also extend our commitment to covering women's football with a regular round-up of the weekend's games in our Tuesday newsletter.
Furthermore, you'll often spot our News Briefing at the top of our posts, where we will pull together the latest news within Cornish football through a series of easy-to-digest bullet points.
We are committed to providing an unprecedented and unrivalled level of coverage for Cornish football — and for just £5 per month (or about £1.17 per week) you can enjoy it all.
Thank you for your support.
Matt, Tom, Gareth and Colin — the Cornwall Sports Media team
NB: If you pledged a paid subscription at any point prior to today, you would have received an email yesterday evening asking you to confirm your payment. Rest assured, this is a genuine email — pledges only turn into actual payments if and when we activate paid subscriptions, and we did so yesterday evening.
See you tomorrow!
Follow us on Twitter: @sportscornwall
Follow us on Facebook: @cornwallsportsmedia
Follow us on Instagram: @cornwallsportsmedia
Visit our website: cornwallsportsmedia.co.uk
