Head of Growth and Audience

Location: Mill Media HQ, Manchester City Centre

Basis: Full-time

Office/Remote: Four days per week in our Manchester office; work from home on Wednesdays

Start Date: May 2026

Reporting to: Mill Media’s founder, Joshi Herrmann

About Us

Since being founded in June 2020, Mill Media has become a new force in British journalism, publishing high-quality local journalism in six UK cities, including Manchester, London, Glasgow, and Birmingham. The company has been described as “one of the most interesting and impressive media startups of the last decade,” by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, and as “very, very impressive” by the Wall Street Journal’s editor Emma Tucker. We have developed a sustainable funding model, with our titles all being profitable or well on the way there, without any grant or state funding. Our financial backers include Sir Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN and former boss of the New York Times and BBC, who said he was investing because of the “exceptional quality” of our work. In the past year, our stories have led to political resignations, questions in parliament, and have even prompted a police investigation into fraud at a university. Mill Media has gone from a single journalist writing long-form stories during the pandemic to 25 full-time journalists operating across the country. Almost 200,000 people have signed up to get our journalism in their inboxes and our teams are sustained by more than 14,000 paying members. But in the next few years, we want to grow even faster, bringing high-quality journalism to millions more readers and growing our subscriber base several times over.

The Role

We are hiring our first-ever Head of Growth: a senior, strategic position designed for a commercial leader who wants to be a partner in building a national institution. You will be responsible for the entire subscriber lifecycle — from the first time someone sees a social post to the moment they become a lifelong paying member. This is a data-led leadership position, rather than a pure marketing role, that sits at the intersection of our business and our journalism. You will work directly with the founder to pull the levers that scale our community while guarding the prestige of our brands.

Key Responsibilities

• Growth Architecture: Own the “Full-Funnel” journey. You will optimise every touchpoint — from registration walls and signup flows to referral programmes — ensuring a frictionless path from anonymous reader to paying member.
• Offer Strategy: Design and execute our promotional calendar. You will decide when to deploy introductory offers or seasonal discounts and, crucially, measure their effectiveness. This involves tracking “cohort health” — ensuring that members who join on an offer stay for the long term and don’t just churn after the discount ends.

Performance Marketing