In October last year the University of Bath was marking its half centenary and my newspaper, the Bath Chronicle, was covering Prince Edward’s visit and carrying full-page adverts for the celebrations. But another story featuring the university’s most senior official was starting to emerge.

Local councillor Joe Rayment had emailed us the university’s response to a freedom of information request, detailing the £20,000-worth of home perks of vice-chancellor Professor Dame Glynis Breakwell. It revealed the university employed a housekeeper for her townhouse and paid all bills, including the now-infamous £2 claim for a packet of biscuits. Almost apologetically, given the timing, we contacted the university press office for a response.

Glynis Breakwell sat on the university remuneration committee – the panel that set her own pay

This story was the first of about 50 on the subject of Breakwell’s pay that we ran over the past year, and which culminated in the announcement of her retirement from the post she’d held for 16 years. It sparked a national debate around vice-chancellor pay, and how universities are run. One professor I was in touch with for many months, John Sessions, believed Breakwell was overly powerful; he highlighted the fact that she sat on the professorial remuneration committee which sets the pay of professors, and he had not received a pay rise in 11 years.

In that time Breakwell’s own pay increased to £468,000, and she sat on the university remuneration committee – the panel that set her pay. The university contended she “withdrew from the meeting” by leaving the room when her own salary was discussed. UCU (the University and College Union) has found that this is common practice in two-thirds of universities, but it had a bad taste about it. In October, when it was announced that she would step down from the committee, it felt like a victory for transparency. Now universities minister Jo Johnson has said that vice-chancellors must not be members of committees that set their pay.

The moment we received a written indication that the vice-chancellor pay dispute could be harming the University of Bath was when someone – I still don’t know who – leaked Ucas application figures to me, Rayment and Andrew Adonis, a fierce campaigner on the issue of vice-chancellor pay. It showed applications from non-EU countries were down 18.5% compared to a 11% boost for Bath’s six rival universities.

Lord Adonis immediately badged it “a big story” while Rayment said it took the dispute “from speculation to scandal”. It certainly provoked the strongest reaction from the press office as media officers tried to dissuade me from running the story. I was contacted by the Times’ education editor, who covered it the next day.

In mid-December I attended the British Journalism Awards ceremony as a finalist for scoop of the year. It was incredible being up against six stories from national titles and demonstrated the continuing power of local papers.

The well-documented squeeze on local journalism, including cuts to staff numbers, pressure from social media and low pay is bound to affect the nature and quality of local news. The Grenfell Tower tragedy is one shocking example of this. In November 2016 two residents blogged about the possibility of “a serious fire in a tower block”. Why wasn’t this warning picked up locally? The Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle, which had covered residents’ concerns, closed in 2014 and content migrated online to Get West London. Although the Kensington and Chelsea News reopened as part of another group, its sole reporter couldn’t afford to live in the borough and remotely covered the patch from his home in Dorset.

In the case of the vice-chancellor pay story, while to some it looked like a David v Goliath tale of a local rag taking on a giant local employer, the biggest challenge was possibly my newspaper’s business model. To attract advertising, reporters must strive for web hits – it’s a daily pressure in our newsrooms. Like all in Trinity Mirror, the Bath Chronicle is “audience-driven”, meaning that if a story is not getting enough clicks there’s no justification for continuing to cover it.

Even though it was clear there was an audience for scrutiny of the university’s upper echelons, the risk of reader fatigue was always there. I had to ensure that every story took a new and engaging angle and use a different picture wherever possible. I also used social media and tweeted each article directly to 40-odd interested people for them to share or comment.

Last year the BBC announced it had set aside £8m to fund 150 “local democracy reporters”, who will work for qualifying regional publishers and will cover council meetings and public services. It’s a clear attempt to strengthen local reporting, and hold politicians and services to account. The investment should mean that more important stories are covered and may ease pressure on local newspapers as they struggle to pursue leads that need long-term attention. If we don’t hold powerful institutions across the country to account, who will?

• Sam Petherick is news editor of the Bath Chronicle