Oliver Rouane-Williams, founder of Ipswich.co.uk, speaking at Newsrewired in May 2025

After spending fifteen years in digital media, watching (and often leading) the industry's relentless pursuit of clicks and impressions drive journalism into a race to the bottom, I've long believed there had to be a better way.

When I launched Ipswich.co.uk, I was determined to build something different – a local news platform that could sustain quality journalism without sacrificing the reader experience and, most importantly, remaining free.

We've been experimenting with our partnership model for the last ten months with varying success, but we've faced one constant problem: creating always-on value for partners when we're not writing about them or covering topics they can contribute to.

This week, we've launched our solution: a new share-based native advertising model, which I believe represents a fundamental shift in how local media can approach the relationship between publisher, readers and advertisers.

At the heart of our model is radical transparency about the true cost of journalism. At the bottom of each article, we tell readers how much it cost us to produce, calculated by multiplying the time spent (research, interviews, writing, editing, etc.) by our........

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