Case Studies

Three bodies of work. All three live. All three built from nothing.

No anonymised client results, no projected figures. Everything here is owned, operated, and publicly verifiable.


01Investigation platform

SIBA Digital

A public interest investigation platform covering governance failures in Southport and the wider BID sector. Built on Next.js with structured data throughout. Every claim sourced to a primary public record.

9

Reports published

16

FOI requests filed

55%+

Senior audience

The approach

Companies House filings. Land Registry title registers. Published supplier spend data. Freedom of Information disclosures. Planning applications. Filed accounts. All public. All cross-referenced. The structured data layer means every entity, every relationship, every source is machine-readable as well as human-readable. Nothing is alleged that is not sourced.

The scope

Central investigation: one Sefton Council officer accumulating unreviewed authority across every relevant function in Southport's visitor economy, with no governance control designed to manage it. Adjacent threads: a council-owned hospitality company with £1.945 million in accumulated losses, a land deal executed without published valuations, a media contractor with undisclosed commercial relationships to the bodies it covers, and a property company owning the body that accredits the BID it advises.

The results

A single published analysis reached professionals from the House of Commons, MHCLG, Transport for London, and Savills, with over 55% of the audience holding senior, director, or executive positions. Formal regulatory complaints filed. Solicitors acting for named parties made contact. The platform was built to be credible, indexed, and navigable under scrutiny. It is.

Recent milestones

Apr 2026

River Law Limited sent letter before action. SIBA filed SRA report 30 April 2026.

May 2026

Formal complaint CL-006 filed with Sefton Council Chief Executive. Acknowledged within 30 minutes.

May 2026

Separate formal complaint filed with the Council Monitoring Officer.

May 2026

SP-14 response issued by Information Governance Team, not by the subject officer. First of 16 FOI responses not signed by Mark Catherall.

The commercial application: the same methodology applied to an organisation's own public digital footprint. What is visible, to whom, and what it implies. That is the Digital Footprint Intelligence service.


02Publishing network

Sefton Coast Network

Four editorial sites built and operated simultaneously on the same Next.js architecture. All live, all ranking, all owned.

4

Sites operated

999+

Venues indexed

257

Wildlife species

What this demonstrates

Four distinct editorial sites, cross-linked contextually, each with its own audience, SEO strategy, and technical requirements. Built on the same foundation and maintained by one person alongside client work. This is what properly engineered content infrastructure looks like when it is built to compound rather than to be rebuilt every two years.

The network is the proof of concept for everything Churchtown Media builds for clients.


03Independent publication

The Sandgrounder

Independent opinion, satire, and reporting from Southport. The public-facing companion to SIBA Digital, built for a general audience rather than a professional one.

7

Pieces published

3

Content categories

1

Day to launch

The rationale

SIBA Digital publishes structured reports for a professional and regulatory audience. The Sandgrounder publishes the same underlying material in a form that Southport residents can read, share, and act on. Satire, opinion, and factual reporting. All sourced. All legally reviewed. The FOI tracker, the conflicts of interest, the governance failures — told without the register of a compliance document.

The build

Full Next.js App Router architecture. Dynamic sitemap. robots.txt. Per-article Open Graph and Twitter card metadata. JSON-LD Article schema on every piece. Newsletter integration via Resend. Share buttons across all platforms including Web Share API. Contact form with Resend delivery. Privacy and legal pages. Ahrefs and Bing Webmaster verification. Built and fully live in a single session.


If your organisation has a challenge that fits, we should talk.

Describe the problem. We will respond directly and tell you whether this is the right engagement.