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About Barnet Press

Barnet Press covers The London Borough of Barnet in north London — High Barnet, Chipping Barnet, New Barnet, East Barnet, Finchley, Hendon, Edgware, Whetstone, Totteridge, Golders Green, Mill Hill, Colindale and Burnt Oak. We read what everyone else reports, tell you how good that reporting is, and link you to the originals.

Last updated 29 July 2026

What we do

Local news is not short of stories. It is short of time — most readers cannot follow five outlets to work out which account of a council decision is the careful one.

So we do that reading. Every story on this site is written from the coverage of named news outlets, carries three published scores assessing how well that coverage was reported, and links every original report so you can go and read it yourself.

The name, and what we are not

A newspaper called the Barnet Press served this borough for more than a century and a half. It was established in 1859 by the Cowing family and printed at its own premises on Barnet High Street, a family-owned weekly that made a point of its political independence. It became an institution: the football commentator John Motson began his career on it. In its later years it was produced by a Tindle subsidiary, North London and Essex News, from Baker Street in Enfield. Falling circulation, collapsing advertising and the internet ended it. The final edition appeared on Thursday 27 July 2017, and sixteen people lost their jobs.

We are not that newspaper, and we do not claim to be. There is no corporate, editorial or family connection between us and the Cowing title or its later owners. We employ none of its journalists, we hold none of its archive, and nothing we publish should be read as continuing its record. Its work belongs to the people who did it.

What we have done is take up a name that had been left unused, for a borough that had been left without a paper carrying it, and start something new online. The date on our masthead is the date the original was founded — it marks the age of the name, not of this publication, which began in 2026. We would rather set that out plainly here than let a number imply a lineage we have not earned.

The real Barnet Press can be read where it is properly kept: the British Newspaper Archive holds it in digitised form from 1861, and Barnet Council's local studies collection holds it on microfilm. If you are researching the borough's history, those are the sources — not us.

Where we cover

The London Borough of Barnet, which runs from Cricklewood in the south to the Hertfordshire boundary at High Barnet. Each place below has its own page collecting everything we have published from it.

Golders GreenEdgwareHendonFinchleyMill HillWhetstoneNorth FinchleyHigh BarnetChipping BarnetNew BarnetEast BarnetTotteridgeColindaleCricklewoodBurnt OakBarnet

Two things we publish are not reporting at all but public record, laid out so they can be read: planning applications validated across the borough, and the Home Office street-level crime figures for each area. Both come from open government data, and both link back to the source.

The newsroom

This is an AI-assisted newsroom under human editorial supervision. We would rather say that plainly at the top of the page than have you work it out and wonder what else we left unsaid.

What that means concretely:

  • Language models assess the source coverage, write each article from the established facts, and draft headlines. The methodology page sets out exactly how, including which models and which prompt revision.
  • Editors write and version the instructions those models follow, set the thresholds at which a draft is rejected, and are accountable for everything published.
  • We do not pretend articles were written by reporters who do not exist. There are no invented bylines on this site.
  • We do not send anyone to knock on doors. For original on-the-ground reporting, read the outlets we link to — several of them are excellent, and we say so in their scores.

Ownership and funding

Barnet Press is independently owned and operated. It is not part of a national publishing group and takes no funding from any political party, campaign group, council or developer.

Running costs are modest — hosting and the per-article cost of the models — and are currently met by the owner. Where advertising appears it is marked as advertising. Any commercial arrangement that could reasonably be read as affecting coverage will be disclosed on the story concerned.

Which outlets we read

We currently ingest 19 feeds:

Running score averages for each of them are published at /sources. We apply the same standard to outlets we admire as to those we do not.

Getting in touch