KentOnline

About KentOnline

Kent is England's largest county by population without a single dominant city, a patchwork of coastal towns, commuter suburbs, cathedral cities and farmland that has always been hard for one news outlet to cover. KentOnline, the digital news service of the KM Media Group, has spent two decades trying to do exactly that — delivering rolling county-wide news online while drawing on one of the oldest newspaper dynasties in Britain. Based in Kent and published from the group's headquarters in the Medway towns, it is the county's best-known digital news brand, a site whose monthly audience has at times exceeded the population of Kent itself.

History and Founding

KentOnline is the online news platform of the KM Media Group, a company whose roots go back to 1859, when the Maidstone Telegraph — now the Kent Messenger — was first published in Kent's county town. The paper was taken over in 1890 by Barham Pratt Boorman, after its previous owners, the Masters brothers, were jailed and forced to sell; Boorman, who had already started his own newspapers in Ashford, founded the family dynasty that would run the business for more than a century. He was succeeded by his son Henry Pratt Boorman in the late 1920s, who championed the extensive use of photography to draw readers in; Henry's son Edwin joined in the late 1950s and was managing director from 1962 to 1986; and Edwin's eldest daughter Geraldine Allinson took the chair at the end of 2005, becoming the fourth generation of the family to lead the group.

As the internet reshaped regional publishing in the early 2000s, the KM Group — then the Kent Messenger Group — built KentOnline as its digital flagship, a single county-wide website drawing on the reporting of its network of weekly newspapers, including the Kent Messenger, Kentish Express, Kentish Gazette, Folkestone Herald, Dover Express and others. The site grew rapidly: by the mid-2010s it was reporting nearly two million monthly unique users, more than the 1.7 million population of Kent — a figure the group's leadership cited as evidence of the site's reach beyond the county's borders.

Mission and Coverage Focus

KentOnline's mission is to be the first port of call for news in Kent: breaking news as it happens, followed by the depth and context of the county's weekly papers. Its coverage spans the full sweep of county life — crime and courts, traffic and travel disruption on Kent's congested roads and rail lines, politics from district councils to Kent County Council, business, health, education, and the coast, countryside and tourism stories that define the Garden of England.

The site is known for balancing hard news with the lighter, community-focused stories that build loyal local audiences — the "giant crab" style quirky features that former group leadership described as part of creating the right balance of coverage. Sport is a major pillar, with extensive coverage of Gillingham FC, Kent County Cricket Club and the county's non-league football scene, while the what's-on and lifestyle sections serve Kent's large commuter and family population. Because the site aggregates reporting from across the group's weekly titles, it can offer genuinely county-wide coverage, from Thanet in the east to Sevenoaks in the west.

Ownership and Funding

KentOnline is owned by KM Media Group, which was acquired by Iliffe Media in April 2017, ending more than 125 years of Boorman family ownership. Iliffe Media, headed by Edward Iliffe, is itself a family-owned regional publisher with titles across East Anglia and the East Midlands, and the acquisition brought Kent's biggest independent publisher into a larger group while retaining its Maidstone-area identity. The KM Media Group also operates the KMFM radio network and KMTV, the local television station for Kent, making it a genuinely multimedia county publisher.

Funding comes from digital advertising, including programmatic and direct-sold display, sponsored content, and the group's wider commercial operations across print, radio and television. The group's leadership has long argued that a broad spread of platforms helps keep advertisers within the group: as one former executive put it, offering print, online, radio and TV gives advertisers better penetration of the county and keeps their spending inside the business.

Editorial Approach

KentOnline operates as a digital-first newsroom, with reporters filing for the website throughout the day and the group's weekly papers providing depth, analysis and features on their own cycles. The editorial philosophy, as articulated by the group's former leadership, rests on trust: "The community trusts their journalists," in the words of former chairman Geraldine Allinson, and editorial teams work hard to strike the right note between reporting the difficult stories — crime, tragedy, council failings — and celebrating the county, because, as she put it, "people have to love where they live."

The site's newsroom covers breaking news with live blogs for major incidents, severe weather and travel chaos — staples of Kent life given the county's motorways, Channel ports and rail network — alongside investigations, court reporting and campaigning journalism. Its journalists also produce video content, increasingly shared across the group's KMTV operation, and the site has embraced reader interaction through comments, social media and user-generated content.

Audience and Reach

At its peak in the mid-2010s, KentOnline reported nearly two million monthly unique users — a remarkable figure for a county publisher, exceeding Kent's own population and reflecting the site's appeal to former residents, commuters, holidaymakers and national readers following big Kent stories such as Operation Stack, Channel crossing disruption and major criminal cases. The site remains one of the most-visited regional news websites in the South East, with a particularly strong following in the Medway towns, Maidstone, Canterbury, Thanet and the coastal districts. Its audience skews toward engaged local readers who check the site multiple times a day for traffic, weather and breaking news, alongside a large social media following that amplifies its stories across the county.

Digital Innovation

KentOnline was an early mover among UK regional publishers in building a single, strong county-wide digital brand rather than a collection of separate paper websites — a strategy that gave it scale in audience and advertising at a time when many rivals were still treating the web as an afterthought. The site has invested in live blogging, video, and mobile-first design, and its journalists were among the first in the regional press to routinely shoot and edit video for online publication.

The group's wider digital innovation includes the KMFM radio network's online streaming and the KMTV local television service, which shares content and journalists with the website. KentOnline has also experimented with reader-revenue products, newsletters and targeted verticals, and its newsroom uses data analytics to understand which stories resonate in different parts of the county — from the commuter belt in the west to the coastal towns in the east.

Notable Coverage

KentOnline's reporters have covered some of the biggest regional stories of the past two decades: the recurring chaos of Operation Stack and the lorry parks of Brexit-era Kent; the deaths and rescues in the English Channel; the 2007 foot-and-mouth and bluetongue outbreaks that hit Kent farms; major criminal trials at Maidstone and Canterbury crown courts; and the county's long-running battles over housing development, airport expansion at Manston, and the Lower Thames Crossing. The site's live coverage of severe weather — the county is regularly among the worst-hit by snow and storms in the South East — has made it a go-to source in emergencies.

The group's weekly papers, whose journalism feeds the site, have a long tradition of campaigning on county issues, from road safety to the protection of the Kent countryside, and KentOnline has carried those campaigns to a digital audience. Its court and crime reporting, in particular, draws some of the site's largest audiences, reflecting readers' appetite for justice stories from their own communities.

Community Impact

As the digital face of a publisher that has served Kent since 1859, KentOnline plays a civic role that goes beyond news. The KM Group's titles have historically run awards celebrating Kent businesses, supported local charities, and campaigned on issues from hospital services to transport infrastructure. The website amplifies that work to an audience far larger than the weeklies ever reached in print, and its community noticeboards, appeal pages and fundraising coverage connect readers with causes across the county.

The group is also one of Kent's significant private employers, with more than 400 staff at the time of the Iliffe acquisition across its newspapers, websites, radio stations and television operation, and its Maidstone-area headquarters at New Hythe Lane, Larkfield, has been the centre of Kent journalism for generations.

Awards and Recognition

KM Group journalists and titles have been recognised in regional and national press awards over many years, and KentOnline's reporters have featured in shortlists for digital journalism prizes. The group's former chairman Geraldine Allinson was a prominent industry figure, and the company's longevity — more than 160 years in Kent publishing — has itself been recognised as a remarkable achievement in an industry that has seen most family-owned publishers disappear. The site's audience figures, which at their height exceeded the county's population, have been cited within the industry as a benchmark for what a well-executed county-wide digital strategy can achieve.

Recent Developments

Since the 2017 Iliffe Media acquisition, KentOnline has continued to operate as the KM Group's digital flagship, with ongoing investment in its newsroom, video output and commercial products. The wider group has navigated the same pressures facing all regional publishers — the migration of advertising to global platforms, the challenge of converting digital scale into sustainable revenue, and the need to serve audiences who increasingly consume news on mobile and social platforms.

The combination of KentOnline with KMTV and the KMFM radio network gives the group a multimedia footprint few county publishers can match, and its editors continue to bet on the strategy that built the site: county-wide scale, digital-first breaking news, and journalism rooted in the trust the KM titles have built in Kent over more than a century and a half.