IN FOCUS
News, features and now conversation- The evolution of the Chamber voice
From breaking business news to in-depth interviews and now long-form conversations, Staffordshire Chambers is building a growing family of media platforms designed to give the county’ s businesses and people a stronger voice.
THERE was a time when communicating with members meant a newsletter dropping through the letterbox or an email arriving in an inbox.
Staffordshire Chambers of Commerce has rather bigger ambitions today.
The launch of the new In Focus podcast this autumn will add a third distinct strand to a growing media operation that already includes Daily Focus, Staffordshire’ s dedicated daily business news service, and Feature Focus, the quarterly magazine you are reading now.
Each has a different job.
Daily Focus delivers the news and information businesses need every working day. Feature Focus creates the space to step away from the daily news cycle and explore the people, businesses and issues shaping Staffordshire in greater depth and now In Focus will add something different again. Conversation.
Together, they give Staffordshire Chambers a range of ways to tell the county’ s stories and, increasingly, allow people to choose how they want to consume them.
A daily habit
The journey began with Daily Focus, launched at the end of 2022 as a joint venture between Staffordshire Chambers and Stoke-on-Trent creative agency i-creation.
The idea grew from conversations with local businesses about what they felt was missing from the county’ s media landscape.
Their answer was a regular, focused and authoritative source of business news.
Daily Focus was created to provide it.
Delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday morning, the service combines its daily email with a constantly updated website covering everything from industry, innovation and finance to education, digital, transport, health and the wider Staffordshire economy.
It has grown considerably since those early days.
By summer 2025, Daily Focus had recorded more than one million website views, 2.5 million website clicks and more than 500,000 users since launch.
Those numbers matter, but so does what sits behind them.
Staffordshire has thousands of businesses with appointments, investments, expansions, innovations, challenges and successes to talk about. Daily Focus gives those stories somewhere to live every day.
It also gives Staffordshire Chambers something relatively unusual for a business membership organisation: a direct daily connection with a large audience interested in the economic life of the county.
Making room for the bigger story
Then came Feature Focus.
Launched in spring 2025, the quarterly magazine was designed to do something the relentless rhythm of daily news cannot always accommodate: slow things down.
From its first edition, Feature Focus has put long-form storytelling at its heart.
That launch issue explored artificial intelligence and digitalisation, with Siemens’ Matthew Byrom on the cover
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