Newmarket News
Overview
The Newmarket News was a weekly newspaper for Newmarket in Suffolk, England, run as part of the Cambridge News operation. It was one of the free weekly titles attached to the Cambridge daily, serving the town that styles itself the headquarters of British horseracing, together with the villages of the surrounding heath and fen country. Its publisher, Trinity Mirror, closed the paper at the end of September 2017, in the same decision that ended its sister titles the Ely News and the Haverhill News.
Of the three towns that lost their Cambridge free weekly that month, Newmarket had the most distinctive local economy of all. Almost everything in the town, its employment, its landscape, its calendar and its identity, is shaped by racing and thoroughbred breeding, and the Newmarket News served a community in which a weekly paper's sport, property, employment and social coverage all ran through the same single industry.
Newmarket: The Town It Served
Newmarket is a market town in west Suffolk, straddling the border with Cambridgeshire; its two racecourses do not even share a county, the Rowley Mile course standing in Suffolk and the July Course in Cambridgeshire. The town's association with horseracing reaches back more than four hundred years. James I first came to stay in Newmarket in 1605, attracted by the open Heath and its suitability for coursing, hunting and racing. Royal patronage peaked under Charles II, who returned in 1666, built a palace stretching from the High Street towards Palace Street, and established organised racing in the town, setting out the rules for the Town Plate in 1665. That race, which he decreed should be run for ever, is still staged on the same course three and a half centuries later, and Charles remains the only reigning English monarch known to have won a race, which he did in 1671.
From that era developed the institutions that made Newmarket the global headquarters of racing. The Jockey Club was founded in 1750 and laid down permanent roots in the town within two years, leasing land and building a coffee house whose site forms part of today's Jockey Club Rooms on the High Street. The classic races followed, the 2,000 Guineas in 1809 and the 1,000 Guineas in 1814, both still run on the Rowley Mile. Around the courses grew the training grounds on Newmarket Heath, protected for over three centuries under Jockey Club care, the sales rings of Tattersalls, the stud farms of the surrounding parishes, and in time the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art at Palace House. Racing and its related businesses contribute, on conservative estimates published by the Jockey Club, more than £240 million a year to the local economy.
Part of the Cambridge News Family
The Newmarket News shared the ownership path of the Cambridge group of titles. It had belonged to the portfolio assembled around the Cambridge News daily, passed into Local World when that group was formed in 2013 from the Iliffe and Northcliffe businesses, and was listed by name among the free weeklies, with the Cambridge News & Crier series, the Ely Weekly News, the Harlow Star series and the Haverhill News, in the package of titles due to be sold on to Iliffe under the arrangements that accompanied Trinity Mirror's takeover of Local World in 2015.
That onward sale was abandoned in 2016, when Trinity Mirror decided, after extensive work on separating the business, that it was in its best interests not to proceed, and paid a break fee of £2 million to Iliffe Print Cambridge. The Newmarket News consequently remained within Trinity Mirror's regional division, run from the Cambridge News operation about fourteen miles from the town, for its final period of publication.
A Weekly for a One-Industry Town
A local paper in Newmarket serves a readership unlike any other in Suffolk. The town's working day begins before dawn with strings of racehorses exercising on the Heath and crossing the town's horse-walks; its employment is concentrated in racing yards, studs, the sales company, the racecourses and the businesses that supply them; and its social and sporting calendar is set by the racing season, from the Craven meeting in the spring through the Guineas festival and the July meeting to the autumn fixtures on the Rowley Mile. In 2016 the town and the racecourses together celebrated 350 years since organised racing's founding moment in 1666, inviting every resident of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to attend the new Craven meeting free of charge.
A weekly newspaper in such a town inevitably reflected that world in its coverage of planning applications for yards and studs, its employment advertising, its property pages for a market shaped by racing money, and its reporting of the town council, schools and services used by the stable staff and their families who form much of its population. As the free weekly within the Cambridge News stable, the Newmarket News carried that town coverage with the backing of a daily paper's newsroom, while racing itself, as a national sport, was covered intensively by the national press and the specialist racing media based around the town.
Closure in September 2017
In late August 2017 it was reported that the Ely News, Haverhill News and Newmarket News would close at the end of September. The Newmarket News ceased publication accordingly at the end of that month. The decision was part of Trinity Mirror's continuing review of its print portfolio, under which a series of free titles were closed during 2017, including the Canterbury Times series, the Bristol Observer and the Surrey & Hants Star Courier, with the publisher in each case pointing readers towards its daily titles and websites for continued coverage of their areas.
For Newmarket, that meant the Cambridge News in print and online, together with the Suffolk press and the racing media. The town was not left without specialist coverage, few British towns are as thoroughly reported by their own industry's press, but it lost the general local weekly published under its own name from the Cambridge stable, the paper that had recorded the ordinary business of the town alongside the extraordinary business conducted on its Heath.
The 2017 Closures in Context
The simultaneous closure of the Ely, Haverhill and Newmarket titles illustrates how the free weekly tier of the regional press ended in much of England: not title by title, on the merits of each town, but in groups, as national owners reviewed whole portfolios against the economics of print advertising and free distribution. The three towns are very different from one another, a cathedral city, an industrial market town and the capital of racing, but their papers shared an owner, a production base and a business model, and they shared an end date as well.
Trinity Mirror's public reasoning in comparable closures that autumn was that some print titles had become unsustainable and that the markets affected would continue to be served by its other papers and its growing websites. Applied to Newmarket, the judgement ended a title whose existence had always depended on being part of a Cambridge-centred group rather than on the advertising of one small town alone.
Record and Legacy
The public record of the Newmarket News is the record of its ownership and its end: its listing among the Cambridge free weeklies in the 2015 Local World transaction documents, alongside its Ely and Haverhill sisters, and the reports of the three titles' closure in the late summer of 2017. Free weeklies were seldom archived systematically, and the Newmarket title's editions survive mainly in the collections of local studies libraries rather than in digital archives.
Its legacy within the town is bound up with the period it covered, which included racing's long boom in prize money and sales values, the development of the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art at Palace House, and Newmarket's continuing growth as a working town behind the glamour of its race meetings. The paper that recorded the town's everyday life through those years closed the year after the anniversary celebrations it would have reported.
Availability
The Newmarket News was distributed weekly in Newmarket and the surrounding area of west Suffolk, England, as part of the Cambridge News operation, until its closure at the end of September 2017. It is a defunct title and is described here in the past tense.
