yourashford

Overview

yourashford was a free weekly newspaper for Ashford in Kent, England, published by KOS Media as part of the publisher's 'Your' series of free midweek local papers. It was launched in the summer of 2007, in the first wave of the series, and it appeared on Wednesdays. Directory listings described its editorial area as Ashford and Tenterden, a pairing that linked the growing railway town of Ashford with the smaller historic Wealden town to its south. Like its sister titles, it was produced from the publisher's headquarters at Smeeth, near Ashford itself, rather than from an office in the town it covered, and it was supported by a companion website at yourashford.co.uk.

The paper belonged to a short but distinctive chapter in Kentish local journalism. For roughly three and a half years it was distributed free in print, and after printing ended in January 2011 it continued for a time as an online e-edition. A defunct-newspapers listing records its final closure in December 2012, by which point 271 archived editions had been preserved, an unusually complete record for a small free weekly. It is written about here in the past tense because no edition has appeared since that closure.

Publisher and Origins

KOS Media was founded in 2002 by Paul Stannard, a former executive with Adscene, Kent Regional Newspapers and Trinity Mirror Southern. Its first newspaper was Kent on Sunday, launched as a free title in 2002, and the company was based at Smeeth, near Ashford, at an address its papers printed as Apple Barn, Hythe Road, Smeeth, Ashford. From that base it built a county-wide portfolio in direct competition with the family-owned KM Group, Kent's established local publisher. Archant took a minority interest in the company in 2005 and, after investing a further £215,000 in 2008 and £300,000 in 2009, bought the business outright in June 2010 for an undisclosed sum.

The 'Your' papers were the company's great expansion of 2007. Trade reporting at the time described a £1 million project to launch eight new free weeklies in early September of that year, covering Ashford, Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone in the Shepway district, Maidstone, Medway, Swale and Thanet. yourashford was Ashford's member of that octet. The launch was explicitly digital as well as printed: each title had an accompanying website and an online video service, journalists were trained in video techniques, and the publisher said it hoped the new technology would open the papers up to younger readers.

Launch and Print Years

Archived editions show the paper settling quickly into its weekly rhythm. Issue 13 was dated 5 December 2007 and issue 30 followed on 2 April 2008, a sequence consistent with a weekly launch in early September 2007. Copies were available free from pick-up bins each Wednesday, and the publisher said at launch that it intended each title's print run to match the circulation or distribution figure of the traditional paper of record in its area. Across the whole 'Your' series, the combined print run was later reported at around 100,000 copies a week.

A surviving 2007 edition gives the paper's working details. Chris Britcher was named as editor and Gary Wright as group editor, editorial could be reached at yourashford@kosmedia.co.uk, and the paper was printed by Newsfax. The same edition carried material about Ashford's Gurkha and Nepalese community, including information about Gurkha community life in the town, an early sign of the hyper-local community content the series set out to carry. By March 2009 the paper was describing itself, in an online edition listing, as Ashford's leading free weekly newspaper and website, updated around the clock.

Coverage and Content

The archived Ashford edition of 4 March 2009 shows the standard architecture of a KOS midweek paper. After the news pages came substantial classified and services sections: property ran from pages 20 to 30, motoring from pages 31 to 36, jobs from pages 37 to 39 and sport from pages 40 to 42, with further sport at the back of the book. That balance of local news at the front and property, motors and jobs behind it was the commercial formula of the free weekly, in which advertising sections paid for the journalism that filled the opening pages.

Alongside news, the series carried comment and feedback pages, leisure coverage and the Kent Weekend entertainment material shared across the publisher's titles. Readers were invited to contribute directly: the Ashford paper encouraged residents to submit articles of around 550 words for publication as bloggers, to text in comments and to alert the editor to stories in their area. Its sister-paper promotion pointed readers to Kent on Sunday and the Saturday edition for the weekend's county news and sport, positioning the Wednesday free paper as the local layer of a wider Kent news service.

Ashford and Tenterden

The area the paper served was defined by the railway. Ashford's importance grew after the South Eastern Railway opened its main line from London to the town on 1 December 1842, with trains running through to Dover by February 1844, and the company later established its locomotive works in the town, creating a railway community with its own shops, schools and pubs before the works closed in 1981. In the paper's own lifetime, Ashford's defining story remained transport and growth: Ashford International station had opened for Eurostar services on 8 January 1996 after an £80 million rebuilding, and high-speed domestic services over High Speed 1 began in December 2009, while yourashford was still in print.

Tenterden, the second half of the paper's editorial area, brought a different readership. The town grew from the 14th century around the Wealden wool industry, had access to the sea when ships docked at nearby Smallhythe, and was incorporated into the Confederation of Cinque Ports as a limb of Rye in 1449. Its heritage railway, the Kent and East Sussex Railway, reopened in part in 1974 after the original Tenterden Town station, opened in 1903, had closed in 1954. A single free paper therefore had to speak both to a fast-expanding commuter and rail town and to a small market town conscious of a much older past.

Digital Presence

Digital publication was built into yourashford from the start rather than added later. The paper's website, yourashford.co.uk, mirrored the printed title, and the publisher's YourKentTV service carried local news and features in video, with editorial staff producing a regular stream of material and readers invited to send in their own clips. News was also offered to mobile phones, and KOS Media was among the early local publishers to promote free news apps for phones. The printed paper repeatedly directed readers online for the latest news and video from the town.

That digital groundwork decided the paper's later history. In December 2010 the publisher announced an editorial restructure in response to challenging trading conditions, putting eight jobs at risk, and in January 2011 it stopped printing all but one of its 'Your' titles. yourashford became an e-edition only, produced with page-turning technology that reproduced the look of the printed paper on screen. The publisher reported a 50 per cent increase in web traffic in the three months after the change and said around 180,000 people a week subscribed to or accessed the e-editions, although the move was understood to have reduced total readership overall.

End of Publication

The e-edition years are documented in the archive record: 271 editions of the Ashford title were preserved, the largest count of any paper in the series, which suggests the title continued appearing long after its print run ended. The defunct-newspapers listing for the United Kingdom records Your Ashford as a KOS Media weekly that closed in December 2012, with yourashford.co.uk as its website. No revival followed. The closure came as part of the wider disappearance of the 'Your' brand after Archant's takeover: the flagship Kent on Sunday survived until November 2017, but the midweek free papers that had once given the company a presence in almost every Kent town had already gone.

Place in Kent Media

yourashford's significance is less in any single story than in what its existence demonstrated. Between 2007 and 2011 a reader in Ashford could pick up, free of charge, a Wednesday paper written specifically for Ashford and Tenterden, produced by an independent Kent publisher willing to spend £1 million challenging the county's established newspaper group on its own ground. KOS Media said at the acquisition that its newspapers had won more than ten national awards, including UK free weekly newspaper of the year six times, and the 'Your' series was the local, street-level expression of that ambition. When the free papers went online-only and then closed, Ashford returned to a media landscape dominated by the KM Group's paid titles and county-wide websites, and the experiment in town-by-town free print came to an end.