View From Bridport

Overview

View From Bridport was a free weekly newspaper for Bridport in west Dorset, England, part of the View From series of hyper-local community newspapers built up in the 2000s by journalist Philip Evans. It was published on Wednesdays, billed itself in the series' shared branding as Bridport and West Bay's own free community newspaper, and was distributed free through shops, pubs, libraries and other pickup points across the town and its surrounding villages. The series passed through the hands of Tindle Newspapers and was then bought out of administration in July 2017, before ceasing publication in January 2018 with the loss of around twenty jobs across the group.

The Town It Served

Bridport is a market town in west Dorset, set around the River Brit a short distance inland from the Jurassic Coast at West Bay, its harbour. Records of the town date to the late ninth century, when Alfred the Great created the burh of Brydian; in Saxon usage "port" meant a place of trade rather than a seaport. Henry III granted the town a charter in 1253 and made it a royal borough, and its market still fills the wide streets, with Bucky Doo Square a centre of town life.

The town is world famous for rope and net making. Bridport and its surrounding area were an important centre for the production of rope, twine, netting and sailcloth, made from flax and hemp, from the thirteenth century and possibly earlier; the earliest documentary evidence is a payment for cordage and sailcloth in 1211, and in 1213 King John demanded that Bridport produce rope and sailcloth night and day. The long, wide streets and the alleyways between houses were laid out for the work, the places where flax strands were twisted into rope. A free weekly newspaper was a modern addition to a town whose communal life — markets, harbour, arts centre and surrounding villages — had been served since 1855 by the paid-for Bridport News.

The View From Series and Philip Evans

The View From titles were built up from scratch by Philip Evans after he left Pulman's Weekly News, the Tindle-owned paid-for weekly based in Axminster. By the end of the 2000s Evans was publishing weekly View From titles in Weymouth, Dorchester, Bridport, Beaminster and Lyme Regis, with a combined distribution of 23,000 copies, together with a monthly paper in the Sid Vale in Devon and the publishing rights to View From Chard and View From Ilminster in South Somerset. The formula was hyper-local: a free paper for a single town, written close to its readers, funded by local advertising and distributed through a dense network of community pickup points.

The series' own distribution leaflet shows how thoroughly that network covered the Bridport area. Copies could be picked up in the town at outlets including the Arts Centre, the Bridge House Hotel, the Leisure Centre and the town's supermarkets and convenience stores, at Charmouth's post office, fish and chip shop and holiday parks, at Broadwindsor's village shop, and at Mosterton's post office — a distribution geography that took the Bridport edition deep into the villages of the Marshwood Vale.

Ownership Changes: Survival, Then Tindle

The View From group's Dorset titles nearly died at the end of 2009. Last-ditch talks took place before Christmas to save twenty-five jobs, and in January 2010 Evans announced that a new owner — an unnamed businessman from St Albans with a successful publishing company in Hertfordshire and other business interests in Dorset — had acquired the group; there had been speculation about interest from Sir Ray Tindle and from Newsquest, publishers of the rival Dorset Echo. Evans said the new owner recognised that the Dorset titles were hugely popular with readers and advertisers, and noted that some staff had offered to work for nothing to help save the business.

In fact Tindle had already taken a large stake in the business: in March 2009 Tindle Newspapers bought four View From titles in East Devon and South Somerset — Axminster, Seaton, Honiton and Crewkerne — and Companies House listed Tindle as holding a majority shareholding in View From Publishing Ltd, with 102,000 shares against 44,000 retained by Evans and his wife, while Evans continued publishing the Dorset titles including Bridport. In April 2012 the reunification was completed when Tindle acquired the six remaining View From titles — Weymouth, Portland, Dorchester, Bridport, Beaminster and Lyme Regis — from Lyme Media & Events, along with the group's three Weekender titles. Evans was appointed managing director and continued to run the operation from the Lyme Regis offices, with the papers published by Devon, Dorset and Somerset Series of Newspapers Ltd. Sir Ray Tindle said the titles fitted his group's ethos of hyper-local publications and had a strong readership and loyal advertising base.

Competition in Bridport

View From Bridport competed with one of the oldest weeklies in Dorset. The Bridport News, founded in 1855, was owned by Newsquest and operated from Weymouth as part of the Dorset Echo operation; Dorset Council's history centre holds the Bridport News on microfilm from June 1855 to July 2000. In July 2014 Newsquest merged the Bridport News and the Lyme Regis News into a single larger paper and raised the cover price from 45p to 50p, and in 2015 it closed the title's East Street office in Bridport after some forty years. The free View From paper thus spent its Tindle years as the only newspaper with a dedicated Bridport edition produced for the town alone, against a paid-for rival increasingly run from outside it.

Administration, Rescue and Closure

The Tindle era ended in administration. In July 2017 the View From titles were acquired out of administration by Peter Masters, chairman of Truro City Football Club, who had earlier that year bought the Liskeard-based Sunday Independent. A spokesman for his company said the titles had been acquired out of administration and that the new owners had agreed to continue publishing the loss-making titles for six months to give continued employment to staff — but that, in the light of continued falling revenues, they had reluctantly decided the titles were no longer sustainable.

The series ceased publication in the first week of January 2018, with around twenty redundancies. HoldtheFrontPage listed the affected titles as the View From papers based in Beaminster, Bridport, Dorchester, Lyme Regis, Weymouth, Seaton, Honiton and South Somerset, together with Pulman's Weekly News in Axminster. The closure left, in the words of the crowdfunding campaign launched to save the titles, a whole county dominated by Newsquest.

Aftermath

Bridport's response to the closure was immediate. Within days, the Sherborne Times — an independent monthly founded in 2008 — produced the first edition of a sister title, the Bridport Times, a free monthly made largely of lifestyle features. Its editor Glen Cheyne presented it as a positive celebration of the town's people, places and businesses rather than a news paper, in a seventy-two-page first edition. At the same time Duncan Williams, a media and marketing director who ran the Poole Post, launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £85,000 by 3 March 2018 to buy the View From titles and take them into community ownership, arguing that local newspapers were the voice of their communities. Williams subsequently bought the View From company for £1; years later, after a lengthy legal battle, he was found liable, rather than Masters, for money owed to the staff made redundant in the closure.

Legacy

View From Bridport's legacy is the proof it offered, for over a decade, that a town of Bridport's size could sustain a dedicated free weekly of its own alongside a paid-for rival — provided distribution ran through every shop, pub and village store in its area and costs were shared across a series. The paper's disappearance in January 2018, and the speed with which a community monthly and a crowdfunding campaign sprang up to replace some part of it, measured how much of the town's conversation the free weekly had carried.