Did you know it’s two years since I became editor of The Teesside Lead? Time does indeed fly, doesn’t it?
The first article was about a long-gone Conservative MP (who remembers Jill Mortimer?) being summoned to court over an unpaid council tax bill.
Since then, I was the first to break the news that BP had cancelled their HyGreen project at Teesworks, brought the story of the fire brigade’s private company collapsing while owing taxpayers £1.6m, covered every twist and turn as TVCA and Teesworks changing strategy and opposing green energy plans they once invited to the former Redcar steelworks site, and of course the ongoing and seemingly-never-ending saga of TVCA’s financial mess.
I’ve also spoken to former PM Gordon Brown, reported on environmental issues, and so much more. In the last few months, I’ve been joined by the excellent Sarah Sinclair, and I hope you can see the quality of work she does as we push The Teesside Lead forward together, offering exclusive investigations, data-crunching, and features giving voice to people on Teesside who aren’t being platformed elsewhere.
There’s no other outlet in this region providing the journalism we do, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we publish.
To celebrate the newsletter’s second birthday, you can now get 20 per cent off the price of an annual subscription to The Teesside Lead. The offer is only available until the end of September, so don’t wait, click here if you want to take advantage.
It means you can get full access to the work we do for £39.20 a year instead of £49. That works out at 75p for each regular Sunday edition of The Teesside Lead.
If you can’t (or don’t want to) pay, we’ll continue doing the work we do, but please help us out by signing up for the free version, and sharing links to our work when you can. As I mentioned, nobody else is doing work like this on Teesside, and we’re journalists, not social media marketers, so word of mouth is crucial. If you like us, tell people!
Thank you so much to everybody who’s supported our work over the last two years. Journalism can be a lonely old endeavour sometimes - you click publish and the article you’ve spent weeks working on just vanishes, but seeing a story get shared, spoken about, and make a difference is an incredible reward.
We’ll be back with another edition straight to your inbox on Sunday.
Thanks again!
Leigh & Sarah