Former Washington Post managing editor Cameron Barr has joined Manchester-based Mill Media as its first Investigations Editor.
Barr, who spent 19 years at the Post where he oversaw teams that won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, will be working with journalists across Mill Media’s six titles: The Mill (Manchester), The Tribune (Sheffield), The Post (Liverpool), The Dispatch (Birmingham), The Bell (Glasgow) and The Londoner.
He told Press Gazette that Mill Media’s model was tackling “one of the most important and perplexing conundrums facing the media industry everywhere… how to preserve and strengthen and grow really serious journalism at the local level”.
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“Joshi [Herrmann] has placed a great deal of emphasis on investigative reporting and on good writing and the product that Mill Media is producing in all of its cities is really impressive,” he said.
“And I think that’s really the most exciting thing: is to be able to, in some cases, restore and revive the kind of investigative accountability, tough minded, rigorous reporting that we all need… We need journalism that exposes the machinations of powerful individuals, whether they’re developers or other types of business people or government officials in these really important cities in England and Scotland.”
Barr, now based in the Lake District, will spend around three days a week with Mill Media alongside commitments to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and other writing projects.
Mill Media, founded by Joshi Herrmann in Manchester in 2020, has grown to a team of 21 staff and more than 11,000 paying subscribers. The publisher is currently recruiting for staff writer roles in Manchester and Birmingham, with further hires planned this year, and has also closed applications for its first head of growth.
Posting on LinkedIn, Herrmann said: “It’s a huge win for us, and also a major win for local journalism in this country, because Cameron is a phenomenal editor.”
Explaining how Cameron came to join the team, he went on to say: “I was at a conference in Krakow when I first became aware that Cameron was now living in England. I told the legendary former Washington Post and Boston Globe editor Martin Baron that I was trying to build up our investigative capacity, and he recommended speaking to the man who was his number two.
“When I got hold of Cameron, he told me he was living in the Lake District these days. Which I immediately told him was easily commutable to Manchester.
“I’m so grateful that Cameron has agreed to join the team. He’s already offering great leadership on some of our biggest stories and invaluable training and mentoring to our editors and reporters.”
Herrmann also told Press Gazette said: “Cameron is well known among journalists as one of the most impressive editors around, and as soon as I found out that he was living in the UK, I gave him a call and tried to persuade him to join us.
“Having someone of his skill and experience working with our writers will make a massive difference as we try to build on our record of publishing genuinely groundbreaking reporting. We all know that local journalism has been starved of the resources to do investigative work, so to have a figure like Cameron entering the fray is extremely exciting.”
Barr left the Post in 2023, later ending his association entirely after Jeff Bezos signalled a new direction for its opinion section, which Barr described on LinkedIn as “an unacceptable erosion of its commitment to publishing a healthy diversity of opinion and argument”.
