The Mersey what?
Welcome to the Mersey Monitor
by Lisa Rand
When I was in my mid 30s, I looked at my kids, my growing brood, and felt a pretty overwhelming need to try and make the world they inherit a bit better than the one I’ve inhabited.
That’s what led me into journalism. I had two pretty simple aims: to hold power to account, and to demystify decisions made in our name, both of which felt largely absent, especially at the local level.
Five years on, I’d worked across a fair bit of what exists here in Liverpool:
The one-time longest-running community newspaper in the country, the Scottie Press, before it shut; an online lifestyle magazine; our main local paper the Echo; and a challenger newsletter blog backed by investors with far deeper pockets than most local newsletters could muster.
With few exceptions, I never really felt like I found a place that allowed me to properly explore the things I thought actually mattered.
So after a bit of time working outside the industry, utterly disillusioned by what I’d found within it, I’ve decided - sod it - I’m going to build something new: the Mersey Monitor.
If you’re looking for scalps, performative social media rows with other publications or clickbait, you are unfortunately in the wrong place and you’re probably well enough served in this city anyway.
Unlike other local outlets that ask you to pay for access, we believe news should be free and supported by the community: not by paywalls, memberships, advertising or powerful investors.
What we’re offering is serious, responsible reporting, admittedly with the occasional attempt at humour, rooted here in Merseyside and with no loftier ambition than to keep our readers as well informed as possible. If that’s what you’re after, then you’re very much welcome.
Some principles of the Mersey Monitor
What you will find:
- Reporting on things that affect people day to day
- Proper examination of decisions made in our name
- Work that looks at where systems succeed and where they fail
- A focus on patterns, not just one-off stories
- An attempt to understand what Merseyside is and what our area is becoming
- And of utmost importance, a recognition of the people at the heart of all of this: you.
The focus of the Mersey Monitor is simple: accountability, transparency, and honesty.
Our approach
You won’t find us collecting “scalps” here at the Mersey Monitor, and that is very deliberate, because most of the problems we face aren’t about individuals: they’re systemic.
The idea that you fix things by rooting out “bad apples” is, quite frankly, bollocks. It gets things the wrong way round. Systems create the conditions for bad behaviour and so if you don’t interrogate the system, you don’t fix the problem.
Too often what passes for journalism now does the opposite: it focuses on individuals, on spectacle, on stories aimed at generating noisy attention while the actual questions that impact our lives go quietly unanswered.
An example
While working at one publication in Liverpool, I started looking into the Merseyside Pension Fund, specifically a decision to lend tens of millions of pounds to a property developer, on a project that had already failed multiple times under different developers.
The obvious questions, as I saw it, were about due diligence. This was an important topic because we’re talking about the pensions of local authority workers here, the funds that people who’ve served us live off in retirement.
I wanted to know: what checks were in place? How was that decision made? How were funds being properly safeguarded?
After editing, what got published (to my relief, my byline has since been removed) was a splash, a sensational story about who had signed a document. The questions that mattered were treated as secondary and labelled in the piece as ’boring.’ I would argue what was prioritised there editorially was spectacle over substance, something that sadly happens repeatedly within some newsrooms.
When legal threats came in, the story then became about that instead. It’s a tactic some publications out there do seem to rinse and repeat, apparently in the belief that what others may perceive as performed recklessness is actually a sort of bravery.
But let’s just step back from it all for a second - what does any of that actually achieve?
In the case of the pension fund story, did it tell people anything meaningful about how decisions are made? Did it improve understanding? Did it lead to better scrutiny, or did it just generate noise?
The problem is that kind of approach creates the appearance of accountability without actually delivering it. It may give you the feeling that something is being exposed, while the underlying system, the thing that actually needs examining, remains largely untouched.
You see similar patterns elsewhere: repeated focus on individuals, often without the means to properly respond, framed as “punching up” when in reality it’s something else altogether. And again, what does that achieve?
It might sell subscriptions, generate clicks, bring attention on social platforms but none of that make this city better. It doesn’t make the world my kids are growing up in any fairer, or more understandable. If anything, it risks doing the opposite, by replacing real scrutiny with something that just looks a bit like it.
What the Mersey Monitor is trying to do instead
The Mersey Monitor is about stepping back from that and focusing on the systems, decisions, and patterns that actually shape our lives in this city.
It’s about asking the questions that don’t always make the most sensational of headlines or kick off the biggest drama on social media, but do matter in the long run.
It’s about doing it in a way that doesn’t rely on spectacle, isn’t about growing a profile or a replicating brand that can be rolled out across the country. It doesn’t rely on backing from powerful people either.
The Mersey Monitor is about doing the work properly and seeing where it leads -we’re trying something different, come and join us on this journey, keep in touch, and let us know what you think should be looked at.
You can email us in confidence at themerseymonitor@outlook.com or call 07442 402 023.
How this is funded
The Mersey Monitor is not-for-profit. We’ll be setting up as a CIC in the coming weeks, baking it into the way we operate.
Small, focused publications don’t need huge budgets to be sustainable. Not everything has to be built to scale or set the world on fire. Mersey Monitor will grow in line with the support it receives, nothing more, nothing less.
We’re not seeking high-profile investors, and we’re not looking to build an empire. We won’t be chasing profits or seeking to keep shareholders happy by meeting sign-up targets.
Nothing will be locked away. You’ll never be forced to pay to understand what’s happening in your own city, we’ll never show you half a story and urge you to stump up for the rest.
If you think what we’re doing matters, and you’re in a position to help keep it going, then it would be great if you do feel able to contribute.
Whether you’d like to get involved, have ideas for stories we should be looking at, or just by taking the time to read, we’d love you to be a part of what we’re doing here at the Monitor.
It might be you could stretch for a one-off donation or something you’re happy to set up more regularly over time. It’s entirely up to you.
Simple as that.
