As of October 2025, SGM has ultimately decided that it is time for much needed change.
With over 109,700 followers and still growing, SGM has enjoyed exponential growth on Wearside in recent years to being followed by 20% of its population, while reaching nearly 60%. Outside of Sunderland, it is also followed by 10% of Seaham’s populace, with small cohorts springing up in South Shields and Durham City.
But with that growth, comes growing pains. The rise of SGM’s news engine has meant that the demand for content now outstrips supply, massively.
This has created a structural problem what has led to a noticeable decline in the quality of posted content over recent months, and this is not lost on those who own the site. If you’re not happy about it, well be assured we aren’t either.
This is because when your news outlet is centred mostly upon a single city, not a large city comparatively speaking, the news cycle is slow, and the pressure of operations exhibits a negative impact on quality. The bigger SGM has got, the worse this problem has become.
You know you have problems if the “stories” of interest on a particular day involve anonymous people complaining about dogs weeing outside your gate. We of course very proud of giving local people a platform and voice, when many outlets don’t and that must continue, but we’re all thinking it, there needs to be quality control.
And on a structural and incentivisation level, how do you get quality control? The answer is expansion. SGM must serve a broader scope than Sunderland. This is of course something portions of our following are uncomfortable with, “what has this got to do with Sunderland?” they say on posts about other news stories. But of course the name of the site has always been “Sunderland Global Media”, showing an intention from day one that it wasn’t always designed to serve “just Sunderland” even if it is its primary focus.
So what are we doing? We are announcing the expansion of SGM’s identity and brand into a much larger Northern scope. We will cover not only Sunderland, but everything from the Scottish border to Leeds. That includes incorporating the totality of County Durham, Northumberland, Cumbria, Tyneside and North Yorkshire and the City of York into our scope, what we define as the Greater North.
With it, we are going to aim to make Sunderland the centre of this region, having once been its largest urban area. A travel writer recently called Sunderland “The Queen of North” and it has a beautiful ring to it. Thus, with this expansion we are retiring our slogan “Connecting Wearside and the World”, because it sounds like it is only for Sunderland, and have replaced it with “The Gateway to the North” to broaden its appeal. In the past, we tried creating other SGM regional pages to divide news, but it just doesn’t work.
Of course, we will continue to report relevant national stories of interest, as we do, but with a broader scope of focus this should have an alleviating effect that will increase editorial quality overall.
Finally, the goal of SGM was always to “promote” Sunderland in a positive way, but the “hyper-local” focus of it has imposed structural limitations which have become detriments to the original vision, and thus leading it to be swamped by people who only want to be negative about the place, therein dominating and dictating cycles of engagement, which becomes a problem.
SGM was never intended for Sunderland to debate itself. It was intended to transform Sunderland’s revival. Thus, the solution is to expand. We will always be a Sunderland centric outlet, promoting our city and our football team, but broadening our editorial horizons so other areas can also call this outlet their own. Yes, even Tyneside…