Ellon Advertiser
Overview
The Ellon Advertiser was a paid-for weekly newspaper serving Ellon and the Formartine area of Aberdeenshire in north-east Scotland. It was founded in 1957 and published on Fridays by W. Peters of Turriff, as the youngest of a series of three sister Advertiser titles produced by the same Turriff printing and publishing business. For most of its life Ellon had two weekly newspapers, and the Advertiser was one of them. The paper was sold with its sister titles to Scottish Provincial Press in 2019, passed to Highland News and Media after that company's administration later the same year, and ceased print publication at the end of 2022. It is now listed among Scotland's defunct newspapers.
Ellon and the Formartine Area
Ellon is a town in the Formartine area of Aberdeenshire, standing on the River Ythan north of Aberdeen. The town benefited from North Sea oil demand and became one of the main dormitory towns for Aberdeen, with young families moving out of the city to settlements such as Ellon, Inverurie and Banchory. During 2006 Ellon ranked as the town with the fourth most rapidly increasing average house prices in Scotland, a marker of how quickly it was growing. That growth made Ellon a substantial market for local news: an expanding population of commuters and families, served by the town's schools, sports clubs and community facilities, generated the readership and advertising on which a weekly newspaper depended.
Foundation in 1957
The Ellon Advertiser was founded in 1957, completing the trio of Advertiser titles published by W. Peters. The series had begun with the Turriff Advertiser in 1933 and continued with the Inverurie Advertiser in 1952. By launching a third title for Ellon, the Turriff-based business extended its coverage across a broad swathe of Aberdeenshire, from its home town southwards through central Aberdeenshire to the Formartine coast. The new paper entered a town that already had, or would soon have, a competing weekly, and it established itself as a durable part of Ellon's civic life for the following sixty-five years.
Two Weeklies in One Town
Ellon was unusual among Scottish towns of its size in supporting two weekly newspapers. The Ellon Times, published on Thursdays, was the town's other weekly, long part of larger publishing groups, while the Ellon Advertiser appeared on Fridays from Peters of Turriff. The two titles divided the week and the town between them. The existence of rival papers gave Ellon readers a choice and gave local advertisers two routes to reach them, and it underlined the strength of the market for printed local news in Formartine during the second half of the twentieth century. The Advertiser's Friday publication day made it the later of the two papers each week, well placed to carry the weekend's forthcoming events and the week's concluding news.
Production at Turriff
Although the Ellon Advertiser served Formartine, it was produced at the Turriff premises of W. Peters (Print & Design) Ltd, together with the Turriff and Inverurie Advertisers. W. Peters was at heart a commercial printing organisation, and newspaper publishing grew alongside the printing business. Centralising production in Turriff allowed the small series to be produced economically while each title kept its own local identity, news and sport. The arrangement endured from the paper's foundation until 2019, when the three titles were sold; in its announcement of the sale, W. Peters described the Advertisers as its "beloved papers" and said the move would allow the company to concentrate fully on its printing business.
Shared Features and Local News
Within the Advertiser series, the news and sport in the Ellon paper were local to Ellon and Formartine, but some features were common to all three titles. The shared material included reports on the local livestock markets, reflecting the agricultural economy of Aberdeenshire; bulletins from the local MP and MSP; and the entertainment pages, which mostly focused on forthcoming attractions in Aberdeen, the nearest city. This blend was the series' formula: intensely local reporting for each town, supported by shared content that no single small title could have sustained alone. For Ellon readers it meant a paper that covered their own streets and clubs while also connecting them to the markets, politics and entertainments of the wider region.
Sale to Scottish Provincial Press
In June 2019 Scottish Provincial Press, an Inverness-based independent publisher, announced that it would take over the Turriff, Inverurie and Ellon Advertisers from W. Peters and Son Limited, with the transfer taking effect on 1 July 2019. The deal took the publisher's portfolio of weeklies and bi-weeklies in the north and north-east of Scotland to eighteen titles. All editorial and sales staff on the three papers kept their jobs, and the new owner pledged that the titles would gain an online presence for news for the first time in their history, and would benefit from investment in efficient publishing systems. W. Peters' managing director David George acknowledged that securing the papers' future had become increasingly difficult for his company in the digital era; the page sizes of the three papers changed slightly after printing transferred to the new owner's printers.
Administration and Highland News and Media
Within months of buying the Advertiser series, Scottish Provincial Press itself failed. In December 2019 the company went briefly into administration and was bought by a new joint venture between Edward Iliffe of the Iliffe Media Group and Peter Fowler, Scottish Provincial Press's majority shareholder. The business thereafter traded as Highland News and Media, publishing weekly titles across Caithness, Sutherland, Ross-shire, Inverness-shire, Strathspey, Moray, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire, printed at DC Thomson's print centre in Dundee. The Ellon Advertiser was among the titles carried into the new company. In 2020 Highland News and Media made a small number of editorial redundancies as the coronavirus pandemic hit entertainment and tourism advertising, part of the pressure building on its smaller print titles.
Closure at the End of 2022
In November 2022 Highland News and Media announced that print publication of five of its newspapers would cease from the end of the year: the Highland News, the North Star, the Turriff Advertiser, the Inverurie Advertiser and the Ellon Advertiser. Two of the titles were folded into sister papers, but the three Advertisers were to close altogether, with their content thereafter published on the Grampian Online website. The publisher, which was moving towards what it described as an eventually fully digital publishing model, said the closed titles were unprofitable and consumed resources better deployed to its digital platforms, where subscriber numbers were growing. The decision ended the Ellon Advertiser's print run after sixty-five years.
Aftermath and Legacy
After the closure, Ellon retained a nominal print presence through the Ellon Times, which had been integrated with the Inverurie Herald into a single title. Reporting on the closures for Press Gazette, former Advertiser-series editor David Porter argued that the replacement title had no local reporters and was produced remotely, and he criticised the shift to online-only coverage in rural Aberdeenshire, where an ageing population remained loyal to print. A local councillor similarly reported that constituents complained of not knowing what was happening locally now that no local paper carried such information. The Ellon Advertiser's history — a post-war foundation by a family printing firm, six decades as one of two rival weeklies in a growing oil-era commuter town, then sale, administration and closure within three and a half years — encapsulates both the durability and the fragility of Scotland's small-town weekly press.
