Head of Growth, Creative Arts​/Media

August 7, 2025

• Location: Mill Media HQ, Manchester
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• Salary: Dependent on experience (approx £30k-£42k);
  
  possibility of share options based on performance
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• Basis: Full-time
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• Office/remote: Four per week in our office;
  
  work from home on Wednesdays
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• Final date to receive applications: Wednesday, 3 September (but we may appoint earlier if we find the right candidate)
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• Reporting to: Mill Media’s founder Joshi Herrmann
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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.

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.

The FT covered our plans to expand to London and Glasgow and The Observer wrote that we are “shaking up local news”.

Mill Media has gone froma single journalist writing long‑form stories during the pandemic to 20 full‑time journalists operating across the country. More than 175,000 people have signed up to receive our journalism in their inboxes and our teams are sustained by more than 10,000 paying members
. 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.

Our new
Head of Growth will be in charge of finding the next 100,000 people in our cities who will be interested in our journalism, and signing them up (and then the next 100,000 after that). This will involve a huge amount of creativity and drive, but it will also need someone who is extremely tuned into data and very motivated by driving up our numbers.

It’s a role for someone who loves our brand of journalism and wants to double the size of our community as soon as possible. You might have a background in marketing for a successful organisation or you might have worked in a growth role for a fast‑growing startup. But the key thing is that you love what we do and you want to help to take us to the next level.

• Data analysis: Watching our growth numbers closely and working out the most effective ways to get new people to join our mailing list. You will propose budgets for working on these different strategies and report back on results.
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• Optimisation: Testing different landing pages, signup flows, calls to action and creative variations to find which ones are most likely to sign people up, and keeping a close eye on what is working in each of our cities. You will try different tools and software solutions that might help us to grow faster.
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• Partnerships: Setting up relationships with other media companies and organisations to promote our newsletters in return for promoting theirs, meaning that you need to have dozens of relationships running at one time.
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• Social ads: Making, monitoring and tweaking our Facebook, Instagram and other social ads to make sure they are driving high levels of signups, and reporting back CPA numbers to the senior team.
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• Social media: Coming up with creative ways to promote us on organic social media, working with our editorial staffers to implement and then measuring the results.
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• Advertising: Experimenting with other types of advertising to gauge effectiveness, e.G. physical advertising, partnerships with local events and creating physical editions of our local publications.
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• Email marketing: Working with writers and editors to craft in‑newsletter approaches, such as referral systems, article sharing, etc. You need to be able to write in the voice of our publications and get into the minds of our…