We’re making some behind-the-scenes changes into how The Charlton Champion is run. This absolutely won’t affect the site, but as a regular reader you should know what’s happening. We hope you’ll be as excited as we are.

From today, The Charlton Champion and its sister site, 853, will be run through a community interest company, Flyover Media. This is partly to separate the sites’ finances from Darryl’s finances, but it also means we can apply for grants to expand what we do and launch new things. You can read more on Flyover’s website.

Both Darryl and Neil are directors of Flyover, and we’ve both put some money in to get this going. As it’s a community interest company, all profit must be reinvested back into the business or go to another non-profit (if it closes, any money left over will go to Arts Emergency, which helps non-affluent young people get jobs in the media and arts, a cause close to Darryl’s heart).

We’re lucky to have a number of readers pay into our Patreon membership scheme, for which we’re hugely grateful. As a result of this, we’ll soon be switching  The Charlton Champion to a new hosting plan – giving it a new look – and which should mean we’ll get the ability to run local ads for local businesses. This should put the site on a more secure footing, and enable us to do some new things. You’ll notice we’ve dipped our toe into selling merchandise – we’ll be looking to do some more of this too. If you’d like to become a true Charlton Champion and help this site, please sign up to our Patreon membership scheme here.

Doing more things means having more people involved – if you’d like to contribute to the site, please let us know. Or you’ve a burning idea for something and would like to work with us, we’re all ears.

We’ll also be holding a launch event – probably in Charlton in the first week of June – where we’ll talk about what we’re doing and have a chat about what we all can do to secure the future of some kind of independent local media in our very special part of London, in Charlton, in the borough of Greenwich, and beyond. Keep an eye out for news of that.

We’re really excited about this – for years the local media in this area has been withering away. Now, with your help, we can try to do something about it.