The Stray Ferret is to introduce a small subscription fee shortly after we launch our new website and app in May.  

The new website and app will include many features that readers have asked for — more investigations, notifications, more lifestyle content and the ability to comment on stories on the website rather than just on social media.  

Subscribers will also benefit from exclusive discounts from local businesses which aim to cover subscription costs and will not be offered anywhere else. 

Since 2020, we have taken pride in covering the stories that matter most to residents across Harrogate, Ripon, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, Masham and Pateley Bridge.

We passionately believe that a quality, local news service for the area provides an important, trusted platform for debate and information for local people.  

The media landscape is financially tough and while we’ve previously adopted an advertising only model, it has not been enough to meet our costs.  

We have watched as other local news organisations have cut the number of  journalists, lowered the quality of the stories they publish and covered pages with pop-up ads which make it unreadable. We didn’t want to do this.  

By paying a small fee you will be investing in an improved news service. By keeping adverts, we can keep the subscription price to readers as low as possible.  

We did not take this decision lightly, but we feel this is the only way to keep serving the area to the standard it deserves, by providing a platform to raise awareness about issues that affect local people.  

We’ve also moved into Harrogate town centre, so we can help anyone who has problems with signing up to the subscription service, the app or newsletter.  

So from May we will be asking readers to subscribe to the Stray Ferret for £4.99 a month. Or you can pay annually at £49.99 which would save you about £10 a year.

In the coming weeks, we will be explaining how the subscription service will work and how to sign up, as well as tackling any frequently asked questions.  

We hope you subscribe — by doing so you will be investing in quality, local journalism.  

For the past few weeks, we’ve been introducing you to the team behind The Stray Ferret.

This week we’re featuring Tamsin O’Brien, the founder of the organisation.

Tamsin is the founder of the Stray Ferret and has spent three decades working as a journalist and in the media.

She began her career in 1990, working as a reporter for BBC Radio Berkshire. In the following thirty years she’s seen a huge transformation in technology. 

She said:

“When I started working each radio journalist had a German recording machine called a Uher. It was big and very heavy. It recorded on reel to reel.

“It seems incredible now looking back on it. I’d get back to the newsroom and cut the tape up and put it around my neck before sticking it together to make a clip or radio package. It seems like centuries ago, rather than decades.” 

After moving into TV news, Tamsin then went on to run parts of England for the BBC as Head of BBC Yorkshire and then BBC North West in Manchester.  

After twenty years in the BBC she returned to North Yorkshire to live in Harrogate where she has stayed ever since. But she missed journalism and in 2020 decided to set up The Stray Ferret.  

She explained:

“I felt this area was really underserved for quality local journalism. Local newspaper circulation was falling and journalism posts were being cut.

“There was an opportunity to provide a completely new digital news service  – I did not expect Covid to come along and change everything but it did and the rest is history.

“Whilst we made no money in the first 18 months, we did get a huge readership. I think everyone got a little more digital during Covid.”

Outside work Tamsin loves to travel, stay fit and enjoys a long walk in the Dales, followed by a pub lunch.  

Her passion though is journalism and she is a self-confessed news junkie.  

“I love the business of news and I am very interested in politics. Journalism play a vital role in a democracy.

“There’s now an even greater need for responsible, sourced journalism as we face the challenges of AI and deep fake technology.

“The Stray Ferret is for everyone – we are making it better and our aim is to maintain the quality. You never know when you need a journalist. We are here so get in touch.”

Read more:

• Meet the team – Flora Grafton
• Meet the team – John Plummer
• Meet the team – John Grainger
• Meet the team – Lauren Ryan
• Meet the team – Calvin Robinson
• Meet the team – Tim Flanagan

We’re continuing to feature a different member of the Stray Ferret team each week.

It’s now Lauren Ryan’s turn – one of our news journalists.

If you’d told Lauren as a child that she’d be writing stories like the ones found in the pages of her favourite fashion magazines, she might not have believed you.  

Born and raised in Yorkshire, she moved out of the area briefly to study journalism to a postgraduate level at the universities of Lincoln and Nottingham respectively.  

After several industry internships as well as a stint at Jorvik Radio, she joined the Stray Ferret at the start of 2024, and has become an integral member of the news team ever since.   

According to Lauren, although she has a special interest in ‘human-interest subjects that celebrate achievements or life-changing events’, any subject that can make a difference to the local community is a story worth sharing. 

 She explained:

“I love writing about local issues that impact a community and I enjoy talking to people in the area about what is important to them.

“I may have lived in Yorkshire all my life but working as a journalist I discover new things about the area every day.”

Although Lauren joined the Stray Ferret a matter of months ago, she’s already covered an eclectic range of subjects – from charity ventures and daytime discos to rail strikes, parking charges and even bomb scares. 

 A story that epitomises the variety the job offers was her exclusive interview with Sarah Collins, a Harrogate singer who recently starred on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. 

Lauren attending Neuhaus’s shop opening

“In order to talk to Sarah about her appearance on the show I had to track down the creators and producers of the TV show and discuss the interview I aimed to do with the BBC and the producers at Hungry Bear Media. 

“I first heard about Sarah a month prior and tried to contact her multiple times, I had almost given up hope when she called me the night before the show was due to air after being given a strict embargo by the producers.“

Another personal highlight was speaking to the teachers and pupils at Holy Trinity infant school who contacted the Stray Ferret to help solve the mystery of a 50-year-old mural they discovered on school grounds.  

She added:

“Due to their enthusiasm and determination to find who created it 50 years ago I was swept up in their search and loved learning more about the mystery.“

Her passion for North Yorkshire shines through both her work and her free time; at weekends, Lauren likes to visit nearby towns and cities as though she’s a tourist, to experience familiar areas from a fresh perspective. 

Lauren said:

“I love romanticising places I have always known by visiting art galleries, theatres and trying out new bars and restaurants in my spare time. 

“I especially love going to vintage sales and record fairs on a weekend, which both York and Harrogate are great for.

“North Yorkshire has an underrated cultural scene and it’s also a great place for walking and hiking.” 

If you think you’ve got a story that might be of interest to Lauren, you can contact her by email at lauren@thestrayferret.co.uk. 

For the past few weeks, we’ve been introducing you to the team behind The Stray Ferret.

The spotlight is on John Grainger this week, our senior journalist.

Although John’s childhood ambition of being a stuntman may never have been realised due to a ‘keener sense of self-preservation’ as an adult, his career has still featured plenty of excitement – albeit the journalistic kind.  

25 years in the industry has meant he’s covered his fair share of genre-defining news events, but his first story is still one that he recalls as being of particular significance.  

“The first one I ever wrote – about the rise of Islamic finance – was a pretty big one in hindsight.

 “That industry was tiny at the time, and no-one was writing about it, but it’s now worth hundreds of billions of pounds and is very well established worldwide. It was like glimpsing the birth of a star.” 

 Longer-form, investigative content is one of the many areas that John is lending his expertise to at The Stray Ferret. 

Since he joined the team, he’s been responsible for raising important questions such as whether the Stray should be rewilded, as well as his slew of exclusives about the anti-social problems in Harrogate town centre.

 Explaining his approach to tackling such a vast and complex subject, John said: 

“I carried out a survey of more than 50 businesses and listened to shop owners and store managers as they recounted their experiences, then sifted through the data to pull out the main findings. 

“I also interviewed the manager of Harrogate BID and the area police commander, went out with police officers on patrol, and spoke with people living on the street to hear their stories.

“At the same time, my colleague Calvin Robinson combed through reams of government statistics, spoke to Shelter and Harrogate Homeless Project, and submitted multiple Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

“The result is a piece of work that really sets a new standard for journalistic reporting in this district.”

John Grainger speaking to Chief Inspector Simon Williamson of North Yorkshire Police

Having both the time and resources available to fully follow every lead, to provide accurate, detailed and trusted journalism is very important to John, and an area he feels that The Stray Ferret truly shines.  

 He said:

“We’re the best at breaking news, but we also have time to put into more in-depth journalism about people and places you might not have heard about before. A lot of news outlets don’t have the resources to do that anymore.” 

 Originally heralding from Harrogate, John moved away when he was 18 before returning later in his career, having previously lived in cities across the UK and mainland Europe. 

 He believes that having lived in the area throughout many different stages of his life – ‘as a child and as an adult, as a school pupil and as a parent’ – have all given him a greater depth of insight into North Yorkshire life.  

 John added:

“Charles Dickens said that Harrogate was ‘the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives’. That is, arguably, still true today, and it makes my job all the more interesting. 

“We have two National Parks close by; the coast is a just a day trip away; Leeds, York and even Durham are all driveable. 

“Where I live, I can walk one way and get into town within 15 minutes, or walk the other way and be in the countryside within five. It’s on the right side of the Pennines – and the tap-water’s good.” 

 If you think you’ve got a story that might be of interest to John, you can email him at grainger@thestrayferret.co.uk. 

For the next few weeks, we’re introducing you to the team behind The Stray Ferret.

This time, we’re featuring Tim Flanagan, Ripon’s senior journalist.

With nearly two decades worth of experience covering news across the North Yorkshire region, Tim certainly is no stranger to breaking an exclusive story or two. 

His career began in 1977 at Ackrill Newspapers Group, where he quickly rose through the ranks to become chief reporter at the Harrogate Advertiser.  

Despite his patch always having covered Ripon, Harrogate and the surrounding areas, journalism has taken Tim to some unexpected places, in pursuit of stories. 

He said:

“In February 1983 I flew to the Falkland Islands and wrote a series of articles about the post-war rebuilding of runways and infrastructure being carried out by Ripon’s Royal Engineers.” 

After working for a time in public relations and corporate communications, he returned to reporting news when he joined The Stray Ferret in 2020 as a senior journalist.  

Primarily covering Ripon, Tim often jokes that he’s ‘the ferret on the ground’, utilising his knowledge as a resident to report on the pressing issues that matter to local people. 

He explained:

“I write stories in a fair and balanced way, covering all sides of an argument. This is important because the people I am writing about know me and I regularly see them while news gathering in the city.

“I am extremely fortunate to be the Ripon reporter in a city that punches above its weight in terms of news.”

 With a passion for community-led stories, he’s previously explored the changing nature of the high street and extensively covered every update surrounding the controversial Ripon Cathedral annexe development. 

Tim has extensively covered Ripon Cathedral annexe developments

While working for The Stray Ferret, he hasn’t had to make any more work trips abroad – but he’s still covered some international stories that have unlikely connections to North Yorkshire. 

Tim said:

“I was told by a very reliable contact that Lewis Edwards a Ripon man and former student of Ripon Grammar School was fleeing Kyiv with his partner Tanya and a group of friends and driving hundreds of miles to the safety of Slovakia.

“The first story I wrote was published on February 28 – four days after the invasion started – and I spoke with him to write real-time stories about the hazardous journey to the Slovakia border.

“What made this coverage even stronger, was the fact that Lewis’s family in Ripon set up a GoFundMe page that raised over £20,000 in donations used to pay for a humanitarian shelter set up at the Slovakia border to help fellow refugees following on behind them to find safety.”

 As one of the first journalists hired when The Stray Ferret was launched, Tim is particularly proud to be a part of the publication’s growth and development. 

He also expressed how much he likes working with the team, especially with the younger members so he can share his tips and tricks – although according to him, that’s ‘most of the other writers’.  

 He’s a lifelong resident of Yorkshire, and previously lived for 39 years in Harrogate, making him a passionate advocate for the area – indeed, he believes that Ripon has ‘some of the finest walks you will find anywhere’.  

Discussing how he spends his free time, Tim added:  

“Apart from walking with my wife, visiting Fountains and Studley Royal, spending time with the grandchildren and enjoying music dating back to the 1970s, I write poetry and have had poems selected for publication in the last three editions of the Ripon Poetry Festival anthology.”

If you think you’ve got a story that might be of interest to Tim, you can email him at tim@thestrayferret.co.uk. 

The Stray Ferret today marks its first anniversary, celebrating rapid growth in the last 12 months.

The website launched earlier than planned to cover the covid crisis as it unfolded last March, in the weeks before the first lockdown began.

In the last year, we have published more than 3,000 stories, had more than five million page views and attracted 12,000 social media followers.

The site has focused on delivering valuable news for the community during the pandemic, from keeping track of the daily covid figures to telling the stories of those doing their best to keep everyone smiling in the toughest of times, such as last year’s VE Day celebrations. Free jobs listings for the district and an index of businesses have also been added as we play our part in helping the local economy to survive.

After one of the most difficult years anyone in the Harrogate district can remember, we will also be ensuring those who have been lost in the last year are not forgotten. Our series of tributes to lost loved ones begins next week.

Meanwhile, we have also carried out in-depth investigations into how public money is spent.

We published a series of articles on the decision-making behind Harrogate Borough Council’s move to its new civic centre, showing that the failure to take into account the high value of the land at Knapping Mount when presenting the figures to the public.

We also investigated how the council’s failure to produce an acceptable local plan left the district open to predatory developers seeking opportunities to build homes for profit, rather than to meet local need.

Our journalists have broken exclusive stories, such as the hotelier who held a New Year’s Eve party in breach of covid lockdown rules and police investigations into allegations of fraud at a company where a Harrogate councillor and MP’s case worker was a “person of significant control”.

We began publishing with a small team of journalists in March 2020. Since then, the news team has grown to seven, along with four commercial staff and a content producer.

Tamsin O’Brien, owner of the Stray Ferret and former head of BBC Yorkshire, said the news team has aimed to cover the issues that people locally care about:

“Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our stories, read us and followed us on social media.  We know that there is a real demand for high quality, local digital news content. 

We have really tried to cover every aspect of how covid has impacted lives and investigated the issues that matter to people. We live in a time of great change and people locally want to engage in those issues and have a voice. 

“We are frequently asked to look into matters concerning our readers, demonstrating their trust in us to report it accurately, impartially and fairly.”

Over the coming months, the Stray Ferret will be working with more local businesses to help them reach a large and loyal audience. The aim is for the site to be fully funded through advertising, with a speciality in making video shorts for social media on behalf of local advertisers.

Head of commercial Emma Harris said the next six months will be significant as lockdown measures are eased:  

“Now we have an established quality news platform, we can concentrate on driving the commercial side of the business forward. 

“Times have been difficult for businesses, however, with all legal restrictions set to be lifted in June, I am confident that businesses will want to celebrate what they have to offer and we’re looking forward to partnering with them.”

The Stray Ferret is also committed to developing journalism students and has work placement arrangements in place with Leeds University and Leeds Beckett University. In the past year we’ve had four successful work placements.