OneMK
Overview
OneMK was a local weekly free newspaper and online news service based in Milton Keynes, England. It began life in August 2002 as the MK News, a tabloid freesheet delivered to homes across the Milton Keynes urban area and handed to commuters at Milton Keynes Central railway station. In early 2016 the print title was renamed OneMK, taking the name its website already used, in a relaunch that promised a bigger and better newspaper. Later that same year its owner, Trinity Mirror, closed the publication, and its final editions appeared in October 2016.
At its height the paper claimed an audited adult readership of 130,000, a substantial figure for a town of Milton Keynes's size, and it competed head-on with the other free weekly serving the town, the Milton Keynes Citizen. Its fourteen-year life ran from the new town's rapid growth years through the consolidation of British regional publishing into ever larger groups, and its story is inseparable from the chain of owners — Iliffe News and Media, Local World and finally Trinity Mirror — through whose hands it passed.
Launch as MK News in 2002
The MK News launched in August 2002. It was delivered on Wednesdays, a schedule that placed it directly against the Milton Keynes Citizen, which was distributed free on Thursdays, so that the two free titles competed for the same readers and the same local advertisers on successive days of the week. Distribution was built around the way Milton Keynes lives and moves: copies went to homes across the urban area, and to commuters passing through Milton Keynes Central station, the town's principal rail link.
The title was not a start-up without antecedents. One of the journalists who helped co-launch the earlier Milton Keynes on Sunday, in 1997, later worked on the MK News from its foundation in 2002 until 2006, a reminder that the town had supported Sunday and weekly free titles from the LSN stable before the MK News appeared. The new paper belonged to the publishing world built around Bedford-based LSN Media, whose titles included Bedfordshire on Sunday, Luton on Sunday and their sister Sunday papers, and which became part of Iliffe News and Media.
Milton Keynes and Its Readers
Milton Keynes is one of Britain's best-known new towns, and by the 2000s it was one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the country, a place whose population and identity were still being formed. A free weekly delivered to homes across the urban area was well suited to such a place: it reached new residents who had not formed a habit of buying a local paper, and it could present itself as a shared civic bulletin for a town made up of many distinct estates, villages and grid-road neighbourhoods.
That civic role was explicit in the paper's final relaunch. Its editorial announcing the move to OneMK said the paper realised the role a local newspaper and website could play in supporting its community, and promised to help readers feel good about the place whenever it could. It said it would not shy away from reporting bad news, but would highlight why local people should be proud of Milton Keynes, taking what it called the best bits of the MK News into a bigger and better paper aimed at showing why the town was a vibrant and exciting place to live and work.
Content and Community Reporting
The relaunched OneMK promised readers all the essential news from Milton Keynes and the surrounding area, together with a range of different content highlighting local achievement. Its reporters were to visit areas across the town to highlight achievements, discover what local sports teams had been doing, and find out what people were saying on the topics of the day. Community mattered, the paper said, and it wanted to reflect that.
The website had moved first in the community direction. When the MK News website was rebranded as OneMK in July 2015, more emphasis was placed on user-generated content, allowing organisations such as community groups to upload their own material to its pages. The print relaunch that followed in 2016, with a new masthead reflecting the OneMK brand and a front-page wraparound advertising the change in its first edition under the new name, was designed to bring the newspaper into line with that online identity rather than the other way round — an inversion that showed where the publisher believed the brand's future lay.
OneMK Online and MKWeb
The online history behind OneMK was older and more complicated than the newspaper's own. Its website counterpart, onemk.co.uk, was formerly MKWeb, a portal operated by Iliffe News and Media partly on behalf of Milton Keynes Council, which accordingly described itself as the official website for Milton Keynes and North Bucks. The site had been run under varying management from 2002, the same year the MK News launched.
In June 2006 MKWeb was awarded the contract to deliver Milton Keynes Council's web services for the following five years, with an option for the council to extend for a further three. Under the agreement MKWeb would develop and support two websites — the council's own site and mkweb.co.uk — and present them as a single city portal. In 2007 MKWeb's parent company, Apollo Digital Developments Ltd, was bought by the Iliffe News and Media group. Articles that appeared in the newspaper also appeared online at onemk.co.uk, along with extra daily news reports that might not feature in the weekly paper, giving the title a daily digital presence behind a weekly print cycle.
Ownership: Iliffe, Local World and Trinity Mirror
For most of its life the paper was an Iliffe title. Iliffe News and Media, part of the Yattendon Group, owned the LSN Media business whose stable included the MK News, and in 2012 Local World acquired Iliffe News and Media from Yattendon. The paper was thereafter published and originated by a division of Local World, as its own publisher information stated in January 2016. Its publisher in its final period was Sharon Hobday and its editor-in-chief Cally Jenkins.
In October 2015 Trinity Mirror agreed to buy Local World in a takeover valued at £220 million, and the MK News and its sister titles passed to Trinity Mirror. The rebrand to OneMK in early 2016 was therefore carried out under new ownership, only months before the same owner decided the title should close. The sequence — acquisition, relaunch, closure, all within about a year — became one of the most criticised aspects of the affair, because the relaunch had publicly promised readers a bigger and better newspaper.
The 2016 Relaunch
The name change was reported in March 2016. The MK News, the publisher announced, was now printing under the name OneMK, the name under which its website already operated. A bigger and better newspaper was promised, along with a range of different content highlighting why readers should be proud of Milton Keynes, and the masthead was changed to reflect the move to the OneMK brand. The first edition under the new title had been released the previous month with a front-page wraparound advertising the change.
The editorial published to explain the change set out a deliberately positive editorial philosophy. Community matters, it said, and OneMK wanted to reflect that. The paper realised the role a local newspaper and website could play in supporting its community and promised to help readers feel good about what it called this special place whenever it could, while not shying away from bad news. As well as essential news from Milton Keynes and the surrounding area, it would highlight achievements, visit readers' areas, follow local sports teams and report what people were saying on the hot topics. Seven months later, the title was gone.
Closure in October 2016
In October 2016 Trinity Mirror announced that it was closing OneMK, together with Luton on Sunday and the Northants Herald and Post, along with their companion websites. All three were free titles it had acquired in the Local World takeover. The company said it was closing three free weekly titles in Luton, Milton Keynes and Northampton as part of a review of its portfolio, looking at how it could best serve readers and advertisers in those markets. It insisted it was not exiting the markets, but would retain a presence in a different way, for example through niche products and awards and events.
The closures put up to eleven jobs at risk across the three titles, in editorial and commercial roles. As part of the same plans, three new roles — content manager, reporter and photographer — were to be created at Bedfordshire on Sunday for some of the editorial staff at risk, leaving a net reduction. The National Union of Journalists condemned the decision, saying the announcement had come as a bombshell to staff, that the papers had been closed without consultation, and that local people, democratic bodies and businesses would be stripped of a voice. Trinity Mirror, for its part, said the closures followed a portfolio review, and the NUJ's wider complaint about the effect on plurality in the affected towns was taken up with the competition authorities, which took no action.
Competition and the Milton Keynes Market
OneMK's commercial logic had always rested on being one of two free weeklies in a growing town. The Milton Keynes Citizen, owned by Johnston Press, was the paid-for-turned-free incumbent against which the MK News had launched in 2002, and the Wednesday-versus-Thursday distribution battle defined the paper's week. The claimed audited adult readership of 130,000 testified to the reach a well-distributed freesheet could achieve in a compact, affluent and expanding urban area, and to why advertisers had supported two competing titles there for so long.
The closures of 2016 changed that market structure at a stroke in three towns at once. In Northampton, the NUJ argued, the closure of the Herald and Post created a monopoly for Johnston Press titles; in Milton Keynes, the Citizen was left as the surviving weekly newspaper brand. The argument about plurality — that a town benefits from more than one newsroom, however small — was the central public criticism of the decision, and it followed Trinity Mirror's Local World acquisition, which the Competition and Markets Authority had investigated at the time and allowed to proceed.
Legacy
OneMK left behind a name that had existed in print for barely eight months, attached to a newspaper with fourteen years of history. The MK News had been part of Milton Keynes life from 2002, delivered through letterboxes and at the station, and its digital predecessor MKWeb had for a time been woven into the town's official online presence through its contract with the council. The OneMK website continued the attempt to build a community platform on which local groups could publish for themselves, an idea that anticipated much of what local news sites later tried to do.
Its closure, alongside its sister titles in Luton and Northampton, became a frequently cited example in debates about the consolidation of the British regional press: a title relaunched with promises in the spring, closed by the autumn, by an owner that had owned it for less than a year. For Milton Keynes, a town still building its civic institutions, the loss of a second newsroom reduced the number of journalists reporting its councils, courts, sports clubs and community groups — the essential local news that the paper's final editorial had promised to go on delivering.
