yoursandwich
Overview
yoursandwich was a free weekly newspaper published by KOS Media for Sandwich in Kent, in the south east of England. Launched in 2009, it was one of three additions that year to the publisher's 'your' series of free local papers for Kent towns, alongside yourdeal and your Tunbridge Wells. Its masthead billed it as the newspaper for Sandwich, Ash and the surrounding villages, and it was published midweek, available from Wednesdays. After its publisher was taken over by Archant, the paper ceased print publication in January 2011 and continued as an online e-edition, before closing in December 2012.
Uniquely among the smaller titles in this series, yoursandwich can still be read. Archived copies of its editions survive in the Internet Archive — around 170 items according to defunct-newspaper listings — which makes it possible to reconstruct how the paper looked, what it covered and who produced it at each stage of its short life.
The Town It Served
Sandwich is a small historic town on the River Stour in east Kent. Its name comes from the Anglo-Saxon wīc, a dwelling or fortified place where trade took place, on sandy soil — a market town on sandy ground. Before Sandwich became a Cinque Port, the Saxon town of Stonar stood across the mouth of the Stour, and the ruins of the Roman fort of Richborough, the landing place of the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, lie close by. Richard the Lionheart landed at Sandwich on 13 March 1194 on his return from captivity, and Prince Louis of France landed there in 1216 during the First Barons' War; the naval Battle of Sandwich followed off the coast in 1217.
The Fisher Gate on the quay, dating from 1384, is the only surviving medieval town gate and is Grade I listed; the nearby Barbican served as a toll house at the end of the bridge over the Stour. In its medieval prime Sandwich was one of England's chief ports for the continent, a Cinque Port owing ship service to the Crown. But the Wantsum Channel, the strait that had made the port, silted up over the centuries — a process hastened by a great storm in 1287 and by the draining of the surrounding marshes — until the harbour was nearly useless and the town stood two miles inland. Walloon and Flemish settlers brought cloth making and market gardening in the Elizabethan age, and in the modern era the town has been known for the golf links at Royal St George's and for the pharmaceutical research site established by Pfizer at Sandwich.
Launch and the 'Your' Series
yoursandwich's publisher, KOS Media, was founded in 2002 by Paul Stannard, a former executive with Adscene, Kent Regional Newspapers and Trinity Mirror Southern, and was based at Smeeth, near Ashford. Its first paper, Kent on Sunday, launched free in 2002 and won national awards. In the summer of 2007 KOS Media rolled out free Wednesday papers for eight Kent towns under the 'your' brand, and in 2009 it added three more: yourdeal, yoursandwich and your Tunbridge Wells. HoldtheFrontPage noted that the group published ten free newspapers under the 'your' brand, with yoursandwich named among them.
The surviving issues confirm the shape of the paper. Issue No 50, dated Wednesday 24 March 2010, carried the masthead "yoursandwich" with the strapline "THE NEWSPAPER FOR SANDWICH, ASH & SURROUNDING VILLAGES", described itself as a free midweek newspaper, and trailed an eating out guide inside. Issue 67 followed on 21 July 2010 and issue 72 on 25 August 2010, a weekly rhythm consistent with the fiftieth issue appearing a little under a year after launch.
Content and Coverage
The paper's pages followed the pattern of the KOS free weeklies: local news first, then comment and readers' letters, business coverage, sport, and the jobs, motors and property advertising that paid for a freesheet. The August 2011 e-edition's contents ran to News on pages 2 to 23, Comment and Feedback on pages 24 and 25, and a BusinessWeek section on pages 27 to 29. Readers were invited to write to KOS Feedback at Apple Barn, Smeeth, Ashford, or to email editorial@kosmedia.co.uk, and the paper directed them online to kentnews.co.uk and to the @kosmedia Twitter account.
The lead story of that August 2011 edition shows the paper at work on a story of genuine consequence for its small town. It reported the start of demolition at Richborough's landmark power station, where small buildings on the 300-acre site were being pulled down ahead of the cooling towers and chimney, to make way for a proposed green energy park. The scheme, promoted by BFL Management for the site owner Richborough A Ltd, was said to involve an estimated £750 million of investment, a National Grid interconnector to Belgium, anaerobic digestion, biomass and gasification plants, hundreds of temporary jobs and sixty permanent posts — and to be crucial to the recovery of the east Kent economy as Pfizer, the town's major employer, exited the area. The story, by staff reporter Marijke Cox, is a good example of the paper's role: a county-level industrial story told for the villages it directly affected.
People and Production
Like the other 'your' titles, yoursandwich was produced centrally from KOS Media's offices at Apple Barn, Smeeth, near Ashford — some distance from Sandwich itself, in line with the hub model used by most free newspaper groups. The August 2011 edition named Ian Patel as editor. The imprint gave the editorial telephone number as 01303 817100 and advertising as 01303 817150, with the Archant KOS Media branding that followed the 2010 takeover. Reporting was shared across the group: Cox, who wrote the Richborough story, was a KOS staff reporter whose byline appeared across the publisher's Kent titles.
The Archant Takeover
Archant had held a minority interest in KOS Media since 2005, investing £215,000 in 2008 and a further £300,000 in 2009 as advertising revenue fell. In June 2010 Archant bought the company outright for an undisclosed sum. KOS Media then employed around seventy full-time staff and its newspapers had won more than ten national awards, including UK Regional Newspaper of the Year and UK Free Weekly Newspaper of the Year six times. Its main competitor remained the family-owned KM Group, whose East Kent Mercury served the Deal and Sandwich area in paid-for form.
The End of Print
In December 2010, months after the takeover, Archant KOS Media announced an editorial restructure in response to challenging trading conditions, putting eight jobs at risk. In January 2011 the company stopped printing all but one of its 'your' titles — only Your Tunbridge Wells stayed in print — and converted the rest, yoursandwich included, into online-only e-editions made with PageSuite technology. The printed 'your' papers had a combined print run of around 100,000 a week. The change is visible in the archive: by August 2011 the masthead had become "THE ONLINE NEWSPAPER FOR SANDWICH, ASH & SURROUNDING VILLAGES", and issue numbering continued uninterrupted, reaching number 113 on 17 August 2011.
Managing director Paul Stannard said the move was not about the cost of printing, that the e-editions could be more experimental — using video, for example — and that around 180,000 people a week now subscribed to or accessed them. The publisher reported a fifty per cent increase in web traffic within three months, though trade coverage noted the change was understood to have reduced total readership overall.
Closure and Aftermath
The online edition lasted less than two years. Defunct-newspaper listings record yoursandwich closing in December 2012, in the same month as most of the other 'your' titles. The Sandwich area's KOS presence did not vanish entirely at that point: the group's Deal title had been combined with Sandwich on the yourdeal-sandwich.co.uk website, and Your Deal is recorded as surviving until December 2013, the last of the series to close. Thereafter, news for Sandwich reverted to the established pattern of the KM Group's paid-for coverage and the county-wide KentOnline service, and the brief experiment of a dedicated free paper for Sandwich, Ash and the villages was over.
Legacy
yoursandwich's legacy is unusually tangible for so small a paper. Because its editions were published as page-turning e-editions and captured by the Internet Archive, historians can still open issue 50 from March 2010 or issue 113 from August 2011 and read exactly what Sandwich was being told about itself: its letters page arguing over national planning policy and the future of the countryside, its business section, and its front-page treatment of the Richborough energy park and the Pfizer withdrawal that reshaped the town's economy. As a record of a small Cinque Port town at a moment of economic transition, the little free weekly earned its archive.
