This month radical web-based newspaper the Salford Star reaches its 10th birthday.

Born out of grassroots campaigning, it stands alone in north-west England in championing the rights of the working classes and the dispossessed.

Much more than just a website, its founders Stephen Kingston and Steve Speed produce a quality and intellectually driven newspaper that over the years has produced some of the best investigative journalism at a time when much of the mainstream media has turned its journalists into content providers, existing only to produce clickbait for its owners.

The Star’s recent paper edition (below) sums up its philosophy. It questioned why the Boxing Day floods of 2015 were a disaster for the people of Salford, while the more affluent areas — including the controversial Media City — were protected.

Local people’s account of their experiences dominated the pages alongside an investigation into why the floods happened.

No-one gets off the hook in the Salford Star and that is one of the reasons why it is respected, not just by the community it seeks to represent, but also by other journalists and activists across the north-west.

Kingston explains: “We started because local people were fighting the demolition of their houses and they wanted a paper to tell their story. The Star is driven by community campaigns.”

But over the years Salford has changed and Kingston adds: “In the last 10 years communities in Salford have been broken up, local independent businesses have closed down and new businesses chains have started up who have no interest in the local community.” Local people and local businesses have always supported the Star, both as members of their board or by allowing them to leave collecting tins in their shops. As Speed puts it: “For those people who have stayed in Salford, they feel outsiders in their own communities.”

Over the years the relationship between the Salford Star and the Labour council has been contentious, to put it mildly.

The recent election of a new Labour mayor promising greater levels of accountability and transparency has not impressed Kingston and Speed. As the former says: “The new mayor gave a £1 million loan to the Salford Reds and issued a letter only to council staff, the trade union representatives and members of the Labour Party. That is only telling the people he wants to influence and accountable only to the Labour Party and not the wider community.” And he adds: “At a time when the Labour council have announced £2m cuts in the budget with 131 redundancies.”

Democracy and accountability are the tenets of the Salford Star — Kingston feels that the election of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has not made any difference. When Corbyn came to Salford recently Kingston was not on the press list. He was not surprised: “After Corbyn got elected I contacted him and asked: ‘How can he, as an anti-cuts and anti-austerity campaigner, justify what the Labour Council in Salford is doing’?” And the response was: ‘It is the Tories’ fault’.”

The Star’s coverage of campaigns sets it ahead of all the local papers as Speed comments: “We give a voice to campaigns, something they never get in the local papers such as the Manchester Evening News.”

One of the biggest campaigns that the Star was involved in was the anti-fracking protests in Barton Moss in Salford (above). Kingston and Speed were at the camp every day, established by the anti-fracking group, as peaceful protesters who were trying to slow down the lorries going into the site came into conflict with a police force determined to stop them.

The way in which the protest was policed became almost as big an issue as the fracking process itself. It was The Star which raised these issues, including the brutal arrests of disabled, pregnant and elderly protesters, in their daily updates of news and photographs direct from the site.

“It showed how the state suppresses dissent. It politicised a lot of people. Many people feel put off by politics, but at Barton Moss it showed how people together could achieve something,” says Speed.

Kingston is dismissive of the Labour council’s response to the campaign: “Through our Freedom of Information requests we found out that the council was working with IGAS (the fracking company), Peel Holdings and the police. They were involved in the co-ordination of the policing at the site.”

After 10 years both Kingston and Speed are proud of the achievements of the Star, but sanguine about its future. Over the years they have funded it through donations, selling cups and babygrows, and the donation tin in local businesses.

They are reluctant to ask the community they work for to fund it: “We don’t want to take money from people struggling to pay their bedroom tax.”

Their anti-establishment and grassroots approach isn’t going to win them many donors from the Labour Party or trade unions either.

Is the future still shining for the Salford Star? The need for their radical investigative journalism is as important today as it was 10 years ago. And in Salford it is the Star that people turn to when they have a problem. As Kingston says: “They ring, email, go on Facebook to contact us. This week someone even knocked on my door as I was watching the football.”

The Star took its name and philosophy from the Chartist paper the Northern Star which at its height in the 1830s was the best-selling newspaper in the country.

In 21st-century Britain the days of the paper edition may be on the way out, but the need for a local radical press that seeks to represent the working classes is not.

• Read the Salford Star at www.salfordstar.com.