What is The Only Story in Town?
Business is the great drama of modern life. It shapes how we spend our time, where we live and our future. It is driven by brilliance and innovation, but also ego, chaos and failure.
The Only Story in Town exists to tell these stories. To reveal how great institutions were built and others collapsed. To uncover the people, decisions and rivalries that changed everything.
As AI threatens unprecedented upheaval, these stories from the past and present have never been more important. They can help us understand what comes next - a technological revolution, a financial bubble, or both.
Only journalism can do this properly. But with many media organisations under financial pressure, business journalists find themselves with little time to do anything more than rewrite press releases and quarterly results. The gap they have left behind has been filled by PR and influencers selling the fantasy that there is one path to success. A PR once told me that the media only covers 5 per cent of what actually goes on in their organisation. We can do better.
A myth has also been allowed to develop that business is dry. It is not. Some of the defining television shows of the past decade - such as Succession and The Bear - are dramas about building a business. They combine deeply personal stories of craft, loyalty and ambition with the brutal transparency of sport - which always shows who is winning and who is losing.
The Only Story in Town will combine the depth of the Acquired podcast with the drama of a Michael Lewis book and the agenda-setting analysis of The Athletic. How did Marks & Spencer become the biggest brand in Britain, lose its status and then fight back? Why did other retailers such as BHS and Woolworths collapse? How did a Brit who developed the video game Theme Park end up at the forefront of the AI revolution? How did an animator go from working on Peppa Pig to building the most-watched television show in the world? These are the stories we will tell.
Every week The Only Story in Town will publish one great story, starting this Friday. It will be sent directly to your inbox and you will have the choice of whether to read it or listen to it as a mini-audiobook.
The Only Story in Town will be supported by our subscribers, not advertisers. This is so we can commit time and resources to delivering high-quality and deeply-reported stories for you, not click-bait for algorithms. To celebrate our launch we will offer subscriptions for £5-a-month or £50-a-year, down from £10-a-month or £100-a-year usually. Only subscribers will be sent our content.
If you love business, want to understand why things succeed and fail, or just want great journalism and stories, you should join us.
Thank you.
Graham
Graham Ruddick
Graham Ruddick is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Only Story in Town. He has spent 20 years as a business journalist across some of the biggest names in media. He has served as retail editor of The Daily Telegraph, media editor of The Guardian, and deputy business editor at The Times. He set-up the popular Off to Lunch daily newsletter and Business Studies podcast before becoming editor-in-chief of Business Leader magazine. He has won multiple industry awards including Wincott Young Journalist of the Year (2014) and Wincott Audio Journalist of the Year (2025). His first book, Risk Roulette, was published in 2024.
