Peterborough Telegraph

About Peterborough Telegraph

The Peterborough Telegraph is the local newspaper for the city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire — known locally, and affectionately, as the "ET". It began in 1948 as a localised edition of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, founded in Kettering in 1897, and grew into one of the East of England's leading regional titles. Published weekly since May 2012 after more than six decades as a daily, it is owned by National World and anchored online by peterboroughtoday.co.uk, a website that went live as early as 2000.

History and Founding

The paper began in 1948 with just four change pages localised for Peterborough within the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. Peterborough was then a railway and engineering town on the edge of the Fens, still decades away from its designation as a new town. From 1961 the paper was published in Peterborough itself, from the Advertiser's offices in Cumbergate, giving the city a newsroom of its own for the first time. A district edition was published between 1966 and 1967, entitled the Stamford Evening Telegraph from 1987 to 1988, continuing thereafter as a general county edition with seven change pages.

The corporate history behind the title is one of the great sagas of the English regional press. The East Midland Allied Press was formed in 1947 by the merger of the Northamptonshire Printing and Publishing Company, the Peterborough Advertiser Company, the West Norfolk and King's Lynn Newspaper Company and commercial printing interests at Rushden, King's Lynn and Bury St Edmunds. It was overseen by Pat Winfrey, son of Sir Richard Winfrey, who had bought the Spalding Guardian in 1887. After 49 years, EMAP divested 69 newspapers, including the Peterborough Evening Telegraph Company, to Johnston Press in 1996.

Ownership and Publishing

Johnston Press, and its successor JPIMedia, owned the paper for a quarter of a century before JPIMedia and its subsidiaries were acquired by National World in 2021. In 2025, Media Concierge, the owner of Iconic Newspapers, acquired National World for £65.1 million, bringing the Peterborough Telegraph into one of the newest large-scale regional publishing groups in Britain. Through all these changes of ownership, the paper has remained Peterborough's principal paid-for news title.

The Switch from Daily to Weekly

The Peterborough Telegraph was published daily at lunchtime from Monday to Friday, with a Saturday morning edition, for most of its life. In 2012 it was one of five Johnston Press dailies — alongside the Northamptonshire Telegraph, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, the Scarborough News and the Halifax Courier — switched to weekly publication in what was described at the time as the biggest step yet in the industry-wide trend toward less-frequent local publishing. The relaunched weekly went on sale in May 2012 with an accompanying iPad football app, and its initial sales comfortably exceeded its final months as a daily: the last audited daily circulation was 13,834, while the relaunched weekly recorded 16,707 copies.

Headquarters and Printing

The paper was based for nearly thirty years at New Priestgate House in Peterborough city centre, moving there in November 1986 after earlier offices in Oundle Road, Woodston. In April 2016 the staff moved a short distance to Unex House, off Bourges Boulevard, bringing around 160 employees of parent company Johnston Press under one roof. Editor Mark Edwards said the paper was looking forward to its new offices while acknowledging the sadness of leaving Priestgate after three decades. The newspaper's former Oundle Road printing presses closed in 2012 with the loss of 35 jobs and the site has since been redeveloped for housing; printing is now carried out at the group's remaining plants.

Coverage Area and Readership

The Telegraph serves Peterborough, a city transformed by its 1968 new town designation from a market town of some 80,000 people into a city of well over 200,000. Its patch takes in the city centre and cathedral quarter, the new townships, the surrounding Fenland villages and the commuter belt stretching toward Stamford and the Welland valley. The paper's circulation in the audit period of July to December 2007 totalled 18,053, and its website drew 126,325 unique visitors with more than a million page views in March 2008 — early evidence of the digital audience that would become central to the title.

Editorial Content and Sections

In its daily heyday the paper published in full colour with local news, sport, business and information, supported by a roster of supplements: jobs on Thursday, property on Wednesday, motors and entertainment on Friday, and a Saturday lifestyle magazine, ET Life. It ran two editions, a First Edition and a City Final. Sport coverage is dominated by Peterborough United — the Posh — alongside Peterborough Phantoms ice hockey, cricket and the city's strong grassroots scene. The courts, the city council and the region's NHS trusts provide the staple diet of hard news, while business pages track the city's logistics, manufacturing and growing financial services sectors.

Sister Titles

The Telegraph has long been published alongside a family of sister papers. The Peterborough Citizen, a free weekly published every Thursday, rounds up the week's content for a wider audience. Within the group, its closest siblings are the Northamptonshire Telegraph — the Kettering-based title from which the Peterborough paper was originally spun — and the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, all of them now within National World. A commuter title, City Lite, was published on Friday mornings in the paper's later daily years.

Notable Journalism

The paper's reporters have covered some of the most harrowing stories in the region's recent history in depth, including the murder of Ross Parker and the Peterborough ditch murders — cases that tested the newsroom's ability to report sensitively on crimes that shocked the city. Its campaigning tradition has taken in infrastructure, policing and health, and its long-running coverage of Peterborough United has made it the definitive record of the club's modern history, from London Road to the Weston Homes Stadium era.

Digital Presence

The peterboroughtoday.co.uk website, which went live in 2000, was among the earlier regional newspaper websites in Britain, and it remains the title's primary platform for breaking news. Relaunched in 2016 in line with other Johnston Press titles, the site carries news, sport, what's on and public notices around the clock, supported by the paper's social media channels and email newsletters. The digital edition of the weekly print paper allows readers to read the full paper online on the day of publication.

The Cathedral City Beat

Peterborough gives its paper an unusually rich civic beat. The Norman cathedral, with its painted wooden ceiling — the only surviving medieval painted nave ceiling of its kind in Britain — the Guildhall, the museum and Nene Park's Ferry Meadows provide a constant stream of heritage, culture and community stories. The Queensgate shopping centre, the city's railway station on the East Coast Main Line and the ongoing growth of the Greater Peterborough area give the business and development pages their material, while the city's diverse communities, drawn by decades of new-town expansion, make the Telegraph's community coverage among the most varied in the East of England.

Legacy and Place in Cambridgeshire Journalism

From four change pages in 1948 to a full-colour daily and now a weekly multimedia operation, the Peterborough Telegraph has mirrored the extraordinary growth of its city. It has been there for the new town expansion, the arrival of the Queensgate shopping centre, the rise and fall of the city's industries and the transformation of its football club. Through EMAP, Johnston Press, National World and now Media Concierge, the masthead has endured — still the paper Peterborough turns to when the city needs to know what happened, and what happens next.