Thirty-five years ago next month, I walked through the doors of Broadcasting House in London to start my BBC career.

There were 12 of us who had been selected, universally to our astonishment, for the BBC Local Radio Reporter Training Scheme. If my memory serves me right, there were at least four other trainee journalism programmes run by the BBC alone. Several other broadcasters and newspapers also committed themselves to nurturing future journalistic talent while a small number of universities ran journalism courses which were so well respected across broadcasting, the press and magazines, that almost everyone involved graduated into a job.

I don’t imagine that 1985 was the heyday of journalism but, compared with today, those were good times for media organisations that all, however commercial, understood that there could be a virtuous circle of investing in their newsrooms which, in turn, was rewarded by decent circulation and audience figures that were rewarded by healthy advertising income.

And part of that commitment to journalism was to invest in developing the skills of the reporters of the future. Indeed, there was an expectation that, however busy the newsroom, the more experienced hacks would keep half an eye on their more recently-recruited colleagues, correcting factual errors and nudging their little boats gently (sometimes) from their course if they were leading to the jaggy rocks of defamation or contempt of court.

Within a few years, many of those training opportunities had fallen by the wayside.

17 years later, having dotted around reporting, producing and editing jobs in radio, television and magazines, I was lured away by the rewards (and unbroken sleep) of consulting. However, I know of nobody who started in journalism at a young age who doesn’t have a hankering to return, to be the first to know, to be at the centre of events and to craft a story.

A few years ago it became clear that the dwindling number of reporters – not least correspondents specialising in the sector – meant that health and social care was not being well served.

While for me, finding it difficult to get anyone to cover stories about the companies and organisations I was working for was annoying, for the one and a quarter million paid and underpaid carers, employees of councils and NHS staff, the lack of reporters with a deep knowledge of Scottish health and care meant that the worlds of one in five Scots were not being properly served or celebrated.

Indeed, it suggested to me that their working lives somehow had less merit in the eyes of news organisations than that much smaller band of parliamentarians whose dedicated press corps (I used to be one of them) seemed to continue to operate at full strength.

I waited a couple of years before realising nobody was going to fill the gap and launch a dedicated health and social care news service for Scotland.

Without fanfare, late in 2018, healthandcare.scot began.

The blend of independent and objective journalism coupled with an undertaking to reinvest any spare income into new journalist jobs has undoubtedly helped us build a brand. Our three reporters will this week publish their 2000th article. We are reaching over 12,000 people a month. Over a few weeks, a single longer article can attract approaching 10,000 reads. Hundreds are now signed up to a twice-weekly email news bulletin.

We are also blessed with the active support of many different organisations and individuals across Scotland’s health and social care community who have not just suggested what we should be writing about and provided us with information, but also then promoted our stories using their own carefully nurtured social media following. Without their help, much of what we report would not be covered anywhere.

It was always our intention to concentrate first on building an audience while, by contrast, making money is proving to be more of a challenge. And, with our reserves starting to dwindle, the need to generate income has become somewhat pressing.

By writing this, I’m asking for your advice.

We have always been open to advertising and placing advertorial. The coronavirus crisis set back the conversations we’ve been having on this.

We have launched a jobs page which is looking promising but is unlikely to be more than just part of the answer.

At the end of this month we will be holding our first events and the intention is that every Friday at 10am we will convene a seminar, training session or conversation that people can pay a nominal sum to join.

But are we missing a trick? Is there something that other news providers have managed to pull off?

The evidence suggests that, with the exception of the global mega platforms and the one news organisation that is funded by a compulsory levy on the public, every UK-based news provider is struggling to fund its journalism.

One option that many are now following is to put all but their most top-line content behind a paywall. There are clearly advantages in this, perhaps mainly for those organisations with generations of heritage and reputation, but our concern is that too many of the people who read our content would be locked out.

An alternative is a subscription model.

I think the time has come to invite our readers to make a contribution if they can, so we’ll start putting a wee invitation at the bottom of some of our news stories.

Our overheads are pretty much only the salaries that we pay so, once these costs are met, we can start to build up the funds to employ more reporters.

Or perhaps we can take on a journalism apprentice to start filling the gap where once those in-house training schemes offered lucky aspiring reporters a paid first foot on the ladder, helping them tell your stories.

If you want to get in touch with me directly, I’m at john@healthandcare.scot.