Hartlepool Life: Hartlepool, County Durham
Hartlepool Life is a free weekly newspaper for Hartlepool in County Durham, England, launched on 22 March 2017 with a deliberate and unusual editorial promise: it would carry only positive news. Distributing each Wednesday through pick-up points across the town, the paper concentrates on good news about the people, businesses and schools of Hartlepool and the surrounding villages of Hart, Elwick, Dalton Piercy and Greatham. It was founded by three former Hartlepool Mail staffers — news editor Steve Hartley, picture editor Dirk Van Der Werff and newspaper sales manager Paul Healey — together with two local businessmen, after the idea was conceived at a monthly get-together of former Mail employees. In an industry in long decline, and in one of the most deprived areas of the United Kingdom, Hartlepool Life not only survived but expanded, launching sister titles for East Durham and for Stockton and Billingham, reaching its 100th issue in 2019 and its 300th newspaper as a group by early 2020.
Hartlepool and its older newspaper
Hartlepool is a port town on the North Sea coast of County Durham, with a long maritime and industrial history. For generations its principal newspaper was the Hartlepool Mail, the regional daily on whose patch the new weekly set up in friendly but pointed rivalry. By the time Hartlepool Life appeared, the Mail — then owned by Johnston Press and printed in Sunderland — had for years been produced largely from outside the town: most of its staff had worked from the offices of the Sunderland Echo since 2012. That context is essential to the Life story. Its founders were not outsiders importing a formula; they were Hartlepool journalists and sales staff, several of whom had worked together at the Mail more than 20 years earlier, who believed the town would support a paper that was made in Hartlepool, distributed physically around Hartlepool, and devoted to the parts of town life that rarely lead a conventional news list.
The founders
Steve Hartley, the paper's editorial director, had worked at the Hartlepool Mail for 18 years as news editor and assistant editor before being made redundant. Dirk Van Der Werff, who became editorial production director and the group's most quoted spokesman, spent 25 years with the Mail before setting up his own wedding photography business after being made redundant some 15 years before the launch. Paul Healey had been newspaper sales manager at Johnston Press in the North East. The editorial duo were joined as directors by Paul Healey, print and design business owner Ian Griffiths, and Hartlepool businessman Leo Gillen, whose family newsagent business had once sold a quarter of the town's newspapers. That mixture — senior editorial experience, photographic and production craft, sales knowledge and local retail roots — gave a start-up free paper an unusually complete founding team, and the founders' shared history at the Mail meant the first editions could be produced to a professional standard from the start.
Launch: a laptop in the back of a pub
The first edition of Hartlepool Life was put together on a laptop in the back room of a pub. The paper launched on 22 March 2017 as a free weekly, published every Wednesday, with an initial print run reported at 25,000 copies. The launch format ran to 32 pages, of which around 15 pages were editorial, with an additional three pages of sport. The reception from both advertisers and readers was described by Van Der Werff at the time as overwhelming. The team expected to move into town centre offices shortly after launch, and planned, once in a permanent headquarters, to open a reception where readers could submit birth, death and marriage notices — the classic announcements business of a local paper. From its first weeks, the paper positioned itself as a full local newspaper in structure and routine, differing from its rival chiefly in the selection of what counted as news.
The positive news idea
Hartlepool Life's unique selling point was stated plainly from the beginning: it only carries good and positive news about the people of the town, and the businesses and schools in the town. Crime and politics were deliberately left aside — the founders acknowledged they did not have the resources to cover them, and chose instead to concentrate on the positive stories in the community. Van Der Werff argued that social media and online forums already did anger and negativity well, and that a newspaper without those elements was a refreshing change for staff and readers alike. The joke at launch was that good news was said not to sell newspapers — but as the paper was free, that did not count. Advertisers, the founders found, actively welcomed the environment: their products and services did not appear alongside reports of violent crime and court cases. The concept was mocked in some quarters — the team were called happy-clappy and accused of seeing life through rose-tinted spectacles — but the paper's survival and growth became its reply.
A print-first strategy in an online age
One of the most distinctive decisions taken by Hartlepool Life concerned the internet. The weekly publication is posted online only later — originally the day before the next issue, and in later descriptions each following Monday, with the announcements page posted on the day of release. The reasoning, explained openly by Van Der Werff, was that putting news online immediately had, in the founders' view, killed many newspapers, including the Mail they had loved, and they were determined not to make the same mistake. Print therefore came first: the paper was something to be picked up, carried home and read during the week, and the website and Facebook page supported rather than replaced that habit. For a free title funded by print advertising, the strategy also protected the value of the printed edition to advertisers, whose messages appeared in a paper with a full week's shelf life in homes, cafés, council buildings and shops across the town.
Distribution through pick-up points
Hartlepool Life is not delivered door to door and is not sold. It is distributed free through pick-up points — at launch through supermarkets and small businesses across the town, and in growing numbers as the paper established itself. Early accounts put the network at more than 180 outlets, including local supermarkets, many small businesses and Hartlepool Borough Council buildings. By the paper's first anniversary the figure was reported as 200 locations, and by the time of its 100th issue in March 2019 its own team spoke of every supermarket in town and over 240 other community pick-up points. As the group expanded to three titles, it reported printing 35,000 free newspapers a week in total, distributed to more than 400 pick-up points. The model places the paper where people already go in the course of a week — food shopping, leisure centres, council offices, local shops — and makes availability itself a form of marketing: in Hartlepool, the current issue is hard to avoid.
Growth: 100 issues, a sister title, and a team of twenty
The paper's first year was, by its director's account, a roller-coaster ride, but it ended with the business employing 18 people, including journalists, and giving work to journalism graduates from the town and surrounding area who had struggled to find newsroom jobs after qualifying. On its first anniversary the group launched a sister newspaper, East Durham Life, serving the area to the north of Hartlepool. In March 2019 Hartlepool Life celebrated its 100th issue; by then it employed 20 people on full-time and part-time bases, including five journalists, and was printing 18,000 copies a week of the Hartlepool title. Many of the staff had worked together at the Mail more than two decades earlier. That month East Durham Life was approaching its own 50th weekly issue, and Van Der Werff hinted that a third title was imminent. It arrived the following month: Stockton and Billingham Life, launched in April 2019, with two further media sales staff recruited for it, and plans already discussed for a fourth title.
Moving into Advanced House
In early 2020 the group marked another milestone: it had published its 300th newspaper across its three titles, and its staff had moved into Advanced House in Wesley Square, Hartlepool — the same office block to which Hartlepool Mail staff had returned the previous year after four years away. The former rivals were now produced from the same building. The move, completed before Christmas 2019, was presented as an expansion step, giving the Life group room to take on more sales staff, with its fourth year planned as a year of consolidation. By then the group employed 13 journalists, sales and administration staff, and received content from up to ten freelance contributors each week. Van Der Werff drew attention to the team's flexible working pattern — many staff worked part-time or flexible hours to fit around childcare or caring for elderly parents — as part of how a small independent publisher in a deprived area had managed to launch and establish three newspaper titles in three years.
The debate about what counts as a real newspaper
Hartlepool Life's history is also a case study in an argument that runs through British local journalism. At launch the paper was, in its director's words, slaughtered online by former colleagues and other journalists as not being a real newspaper. The criticism was that a title which declines to cover crime, courts and politics is avoiding the hard core of news. The founders' counter-argument was pragmatic and community-based: readers in a town that had endured a decade of austerity valued a paper that gave them, as Van Der Werff put it, a light at the end of the tunnel, and advertisers valued a positive environment. The paper never claimed to replace the Mail's news function; it claimed a niche and proved, commercially, that the niche existed. Its milestones — 100 issues, three titles, a growing staff including young local journalists given their first jobs — are the evidence its team cites that the concept of positive news was proved despite the sceptics inside and outside journalism.
Hartlepool Life today
Hartlepool Life remains the flagship of a small independent group that demonstrated, against the prevailing trend, that new printed weeklies could still be launched in the late 2010s by journalists rooted in their patch. Its formula is consistent: a free Wednesday paper, picked up from hundreds of points around the town, filled with positive stories about Hartlepool people, businesses and schools, with sport and announcements, published online only after the print edition has had its moment, and supported by a Facebook page and website. Its wider significance reaches beyond one town. At a time when the standard story about local news was closure, centralisation and journalists reporting towns from offices miles away, Hartlepool Life told the opposite story — ex-daily staffers starting again in a pub back room, printing 25,000 copies, hiring locally, and expanding into neighbouring towns. Whether or not one accepts its definition of news, its record is a matter of fact: launched 22 March 2017, still publishing weekly, and the parent of East Durham Life and Stockton and Billingham Life.
