Help us shape The Lead in 2025
As we head into a new year, your chance to tell us what you think + hello from our new editorial line-up
Hello and a Happy New Year!
We hope you’re back in the swing of things okay and we wanted to introduce ourselves properly as the year gets going, and ask for your opinion too.
The Lead wants to be a progressive and different voice in the UK media scene, fusing together our local titles in the North of England with our national edition too. It’s important we’re writing pieces that you, our readers, are sharing your thoughts to help influence those.
We’re running a reader survey and this will help us in our commissioning for the year ahead and what to focus on - it shouldn’t just be us as editors deciding.
If you can spare a couple of minutes, there’s eight questions and it’s not too taxing (promise!).
And now a quick update on our team line-up, as you may have read before Christmas we said farewell to founding editor Dimi Reider who is off to pastures new. There were some lovely goodbye messages to Dimi, thank you to those who took the time to write.
Steering The Lead ship are northern duo
and who have been building The Lead North’s titles and stories across Blackpool, Lancashire, Teesside, Calderdale and a host of other places during 2024.We’ll be working closely with Westminster Editor
and national editor Natalie Morris when she returns from maternity leave. We’re also supported by social media journalist Swain and partnerships editor .A little more about Ed, Zoë and Luke below…
Luke is the senior editor (North) for The Lead and works from Preston in Lancashire. He’s worked in regional journalism for over a decade and joined The Lead in January 2024.
He is passionate about good, thorough reporting on the environment, the housing crisis and the hospitality industry and believes that news told through people’s stories and experiences is the most powerful way to do it.
Luke said: “The most important part of journalism to me is its ability to make a genuine and tangible difference in people’s lives. The more we can do that with The Lead, the happier I’ll be.”
Zoë is a political journalist and broadcaster and the Lead’s Westminster Editor. Prior to this, she was a lobby correspondent in Westminster for the New Statesman and the Independent, and a Clerk in the House of Commons. Here at The Lead, she writes features about failures and blindspots in government policy, as well as analysis and comment on the state of British politics.
You might sometimes see – or hear her – on your TV or radio as she’s often invited to talk about the news on broadcast media and podcasts such as Politics Uncensored, Oh God What Now? and Pod Save The UK.
Zoë said: “I’m proud to be working with the fearless, scrappy organisation that is The Lead, as it seeks to reignite local journalism and provide a critical friend to the Labour government. Now, more than ever, do we need media that supports a progressive government in their plans to make the UK a better place.”
See some of Zoe’s recent writing for The Lead:
And I’m Ed, I spent nearly 15 years at the UK’s largest commercial news publisher [don’t hate on me] Reach Plc and oversaw rapid growth of its regional news output and portfolio - as well as editing a number of local and regional titles during that time.
Alongside this I founded and continue to run one of the UK’s leading independent community news titles, Blog Preston, which covers the city of Preston where I live. I’ve spent more than 10 years reporting on the ins and outs of the city.
I think, whatever stories we do on The Lead, it’s important we keep people at the heart of them - no matter how big, or small, the issue written about may seem.
So please do take a moment to do our reader survey and ensure we have your stories at heart in 2025.
Thanks for reading and we’ll be back on Thursday with our latest piece for you to enjoy direct to inboxes. We can only do this with reader support though, so if you are in a position to consider upgrading to a paid subscription then we’d really appreciate that boost to help us in the 12 months ahead.
Ed, Zoë, Luke, Sophie, Natalie and Leah
p.s. we often give a heads up on stories we’re looking at in our next edition in our subscriber-only chat, as well as on our socials too - mainly across X and Bluesky at the moment.