Northern Soul site launches in Manchester

A new site providing news on entertainment and culture has launched in Manchester, with a focus on quality, professional writing.

Northern Soul, founded by former Times journalist Helen Nugent, launched on Thursday (9 May). It will initially focus on the Greater Manchester area with previews, reviews and features on cultural events and locations before expanding to cover most of the north of England.

"There's an overwhelming response of people saying 'yes we want real quality journalism about all the great stuff to do north of the Watford gap'," Nugent told Journalism.co.uk.

"It's not a listings website, it's not trying to cover everything," she continued. "The idea is that someone who has no interest in electronic music at an underground club can still derive pleasure from reading an article about it because the writing is so good. The writing is meant to be an end in itself."

Nugent, who wrote for a host of national broadsheets during her 15 years in London, is joined by the Guardian's former northern correspondent Helen Carter, Drew Savage of the BBC, and other professional writers based around Manchester, many of whom are current or former BBC or Manchester Evening News journalists.

"There are so many wonderful things to do and fantastic cultural events up here," Nugent said. 

Initial reaction to the site's launch has been overwhelmingly positive, Nugent said, a success she attributes to the entertaining and professional nature of the writing built on the back of years of research and hard work.

"I did do a lot of work looking at journalists, blogs, professional sites," she said, "I practised by setting up the hyperblog and my own professional site and a lot of it was trial and error. My starting point was to look at a lot of sites that were out there already, not just blogs but listing sites and the online parts of newspapers, looking at local press. I'd gathered together an enormous amount of material."

Since returning to Manchester from London, Nugent also worked on building up a network of contacts in the area to complement her connections in London. As such, she saw the process almost as an exercise in personal branding to lend the site credibility upon its launch



"It was deliberate that I didn't just come back and launch it straight away," she said. "It has been along process but in terms of exactly how I wanted the site to look all I knew was that I wanted a professional graphic designer to do it, I wanted a professional IT company and I wanted professional writers."

All the writers currently operate on a volunteer basis and Nugent has a two-year business plan to make the site commercially viable, while also keeping it independent and free invasive adverts.

"At the moment it's just me and all my writers are volunteers but the hope and aspiration is that it will become a commercially viable site and people will be paid," she said.

"I strongly believe that if you're a professional writer and a journalist then you should be paid but times being what they are, I had to do work for free when I moved back here and I'd been at The Times for 10 years.

"It wasn't easy to get a job and I think journalists have really come to see that; a few years ago no one would have worked for free and now journalism models are changing. But it will never be a site that is littered with adverts or anything like that, the idea is to keep it independent to keep the site looking very clean."

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