yourthanet

Overview

yourthanet was a free weekly newspaper for the Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, published by KOS Media as part of the 'Your' series of free midweek papers launched in the summer of 2007. It appeared on Wednesdays, was distributed free, and had a website at yourthanet.co.uk. Directory listings described its editorial area as Thanet and district: the three seaside towns of Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs and the villages of the Isle between them. Although catalogued under Margate, the first of the three towns, the paper belonged to the whole Isle.

Printing ended in January 2011, when the publisher converted the 'Your' titles into online e-editions. A defunct-newspapers listing records Your Thanet closing in December 2012, with 269 archived editions preserved. It is written about here in the past tense.

Publisher and Origins

KOS Media was founded in 2002 by Paul Stannard, a former executive with Adscene, Kent Regional Newspapers and Trinity Mirror Southern, and built from the free Kent on Sunday into a county-wide challenger to the family-owned KM Group. The 'Your' series was its £1 million expansion of 2007: eight free weeklies for Ashford, Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone's Shepway district, Maidstone, Medway, Swale and Thanet, each with a website and online video service, launched in early September with print runs intended to match the traditional paper of record in each area.

Thanet had a particular place in the publisher's portfolio. Alongside the free paper, KOS Media published Isle Magazine, a quarterly magazine for the Isle of Thanet carrying listings and tourist information, with a digital edition online — a companion that underlined how much of the Isle's economy rested on visitors. Archant backed the company from 2005, invested £215,000 in 2008 and £300,000 in 2009, and bought it outright in June 2010, after which the 'Your' papers' print days were numbered.

The Isle It Served

The Isle of Thanet is the peninsula at the tip of Kent's north-east coast, its chalk cliffs and sandy bays facing the North Sea and the Channel. Its three towns had grown together into a single conurbation with distinct characters. Margate, a resort popular with Londoners since steamboats began running from the capital in 1816 and connected by rail in 1846, drew the painter J. M. W. Turner to stay and paint its skies; its Dreamland amusement park opened in the 1920s, and the Turner Contemporary gallery later spearheaded an arts-led revival, alongside the mysterious Shell Grotto, decorated with millions of shells.

Broadstairs, with its seven sandy bays and clifftop promenade, was Charles Dickens's favourite holiday town, a connection celebrated by the Dickens House Museum and an annual festival. Ramsgate, a historic maritime town, possessed the only Royal Harbour in the country, more than 450 listed buildings, architecture by Augustus Pugin, and the Ramsgate Tunnels, the wartime complex in which more than 300 families were permanently sheltered during the Second World War. The Isle offered 16 sandy beaches and a 32-mile Viking Coastal Trail, and could be reached from London by high-speed train in about 75 minutes — the visitor economy that yourthanet's news, leisure pages and quarterly sister magazine all served.

Coverage and Content

In Thanet, yourthanet entered one of Kent's fullest local media markets. The Isle's paid-for papers were the Isle of Thanet Gazette and the Thanet Times, both then owned by Northcliffe Media; the Thanet Times closed in October 2012 after 116 years, during yourthanet's own final months. Free competition came from the KM Group's Thanet Extra, so that readers in Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs alike were listed as having two paid papers, a rival free paper and yourthanet, plus local and community radio. Few districts of its size in England were so contested.

The paper itself followed the series pattern seen in the publisher's archived editions: Isle news, comment and letters at the front, followed by leisure and entertainment material, including the Kent Weekend guide, and the shared property, motoring, jobs and sport sections that funded free distribution. Its bylines and pages sat alongside the publisher's county operation based at Smeeth, near Ashford, while its quarterly sister, Isle Magazine, handled the visitor-facing side of Thanet life. Readers were encouraged to contribute stories and video through the website and the YourKentTV service, and to follow news on mobile phones.

The Print Paper

As a printed title, yourthanet was available free from pick-up points each Wednesday, part of a series whose combined print run was later reported at around 100,000 copies a week. It stayed free throughout its print life, including after June 2009, when the publisher's Saturday and Sunday papers became part-paid in newsagents while the midweek titles continued free. Portfolio summaries in 2009 listed Thanet among the eight original 'Your' territories, alongside Ashford, Canterbury, Dover, Maidstone, Medway, Shepway and Swale.

The free paper's timing coincided with a period of strain and change on the Isle. The Thanet Times was delivered free to some areas before its closure, the established publishers were consolidating, and Margate's regeneration — Turner Contemporary, the Old Town's independent shops and the revival of Dreamland — was becoming the Isle's biggest continuing story. A free weekly devoted to Thanet and district was well placed to chronicle that transition, and its archive covers precisely the years in which the Isle's arts-led revival gathered pace.

Digital Presence

yourthanet was launched as a combined print, web and video title, with its own website and the publisher's YourKentTV channel carrying local news and sport in video. In December 2010 the publisher announced an editorial restructure in response to challenging trading conditions, putting eight jobs at risk, and in January 2011 printing of the 'Your' titles ceased. The Thanet paper continued as a page-turning e-edition; the publisher reported a 50 per cent increase in web traffic in the following three months and around 180,000 weekly users of the e-editions across the series.

Managing director Paul Stannard said the switch was not driven by printing costs and that it allowed the company to expand its flagship Kent on Saturday and Kent on Sunday, while the e-editions, unconfined by print, could experiment with video inside their pages. In practice the move ended the free paper's physical presence in the Isle's three towns, where pick-up distribution had been central to the 'Your' model since 2007.

End of Publication

The defunct-newspapers listing records Your Thanet closing in December 2012, with 269 archived editions and yourthanet.co.uk as its website. The closure fell in the same season as the end of the Thanet Times, so the Isle lost a free weekly and a 116-year-old paid title within weeks of each other. The Gazette and the KM free paper remained, and Thanet news increasingly migrated to county-wide online brands, but the dedicated free Wednesday paper for the whole Isle was not replaced.

Place in Kent Media

yourthanet completed the coastal arc of the 'Your' series, which placed a free paper in almost every Kent seaside district. For five years it gave Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs a shared free weekly from the publisher that also produced the Isle's quarterly magazine, in a market already rich in paid and free titles. Its 269 archived editions preserve a Thanet-wide record of the years of the Turner Contemporary opening and the seaside revival — a local chronicle created not by the Isle's historic publishers, but by the Kent challenger that briefly set out to cover the whole county town by town.