Sherborne Times
Overview
The Sherborne Times is a free monthly community newspaper for Sherborne in Dorset, England, founded in 2008. It is an independent title made up largely of lifestyle features rather than conventional news reporting, presenting itself as a monthly celebration of the people, places and businesses of the town. Each issue is a substantial glossy-style production running to more than sixty pages, filled with features, photography, food writing, property commentary and columns contributed by people in and around the town.
The Times is the founding title of a small Dorset family of publications. In January 2018 it was joined by a sister title, the Bridport Times, launched for the neighbouring west Dorset town of Bridport after that town lost its weekly newspaper. The Sherborne paper's own description of its purpose, celebrating people, place and purveyor, captures a model that sits deliberately apart from the news-led local press: its team has described the titles not as journalism in the conventional sense, but as a positive platform for the stories of the communities they serve.
Sherborne: The Town It Serves
Sherborne is a small market town in north Dorset, in the south-west of England, standing on the River Yeo. Its name derives from the Old English for a clear stream, and its history is exceptionally deep for a town of its size. In 705 the diocese of Sherborne was created and St Aldhelm became its first bishop, making the town for a time the capital of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex; two elder brothers of Alfred the Great, Kings Ethelbald and Ethelbert, are buried in its abbey. The bishop's seat moved to Old Sarum in 1075 and the church became a Benedictine monastery, was rebuilt between the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries after a fire during tensions between town and monastery, and at the Dissolution in 1539 passed into lay hands, becoming the parish church it remains today.
Much of the town, including many medieval and Georgian buildings, is built from the distinctive ochre hamstone of the area. Sir Walter Raleigh built an Elizabethan mansion in the grounds of the ruined twelfth-century castle in 1594, today known as Sherborne Castle. Education is a defining presence: a school existed in Sherborne from the time of Alfred, refounded in 1550 as a royal school using the old abbey buildings, and the town is home to Sherborne School, Sherborne Girls, founded in 1895, and other schools whose pupils form a large part of its daytime population. Its traditional high street, Cheap Street, is lined with boutiques, galleries, delis and antique shops, and the town supports a literary society, a historical society, a museum housed in the former abbey gatehouse, regular markets and a popular Christmas market.
Founding in 2008
The Sherborne Times was founded in 2008 as an independent free monthly. Its creation went against the grain of the period: the late 2000s were years of contraction for Dorset's local press, when long-established paid weeklies were closing offices and the county's news was consolidating into fewer, larger titles. A free monthly built on features rather than news offered a different proposition, both to readers, who received a substantial magazine-like paper without charge, and to the local businesses whose advertising supported it and whose stories it set out to tell.
The model also suited the town. Sherborne's economy rests heavily on independent retail, food, property, tourism and its schools, all subjects that lend themselves to the feature treatment rather than to weekly news coverage, which in the area was already provided by established titles including the Western Gazette and the Dorset Echo. The Times therefore grew up as a complement to those papers rather than a direct rival to them.
Editorial Approach
The ethos of the Times was stated most plainly when its sister title launched in 2018. The editor, Glen Cheyne, welcomed readers by describing the new paper as a celebration of its town, and explained that the team behind the titles did not regard themselves as journalists seeking to join arguments over news and opinion, but as a small, well-intentioned group of writers, artists, designers and photographers looking for and championing the good in others, and inviting readers to fill the pages with their own words and colour. The same description was applied to the Sherborne paper's approach: a positive platform to celebrate the town, its businesses and its stories.
That philosophy shaped the content. Instead of council disputes and court reports, the Times filled its pages with profiles of local people and firms, restaurant and food features, seasonal recipes, photography, property market commentary and contributed columns. A Sherborne photographer, for example, contributed a regular two-page monthly feature on life in the town, food writers supplied multi-page seasonal recipe features that ran deep into each issue, and local music and culture writers contributed standing columns. An estate agent's bi-monthly property column, announced after more than a decade of writing market commentary, illustrates the paper's habit of drawing its voices from the town's own professional community.
Format and Production
The Times is published monthly and distributed free. It is produced to a generous extent: the February 2020 edition was still carrying feature material beyond page 66, and its Bridport sister's first edition ran to 72 pages. Pagination on that scale, sustained month after month by a small independent team, marks the titles out from the thinner freesheets more typical of the sector, and reflects a design-led production model in which photography and layout carry as much weight as text.
The paper's strapline, describing it as a monthly celebration of people, place and purveyor, appears on its editions alongside its website address, and its covers are built around a single strong local feature, such as a newly opened restaurant in a restored building in a neighbouring village, treated at length with commissioned photography. The result is closer in feel to a county lifestyle magazine than to a traditional local newspaper, while remaining, in name and in its free distribution to the town, a newspaper for Sherborne.
Digital Edition
Alongside its print distribution, the Sherborne Times publishes a digital edition through its website, sherbornetimes.co.uk, where readers can turn the pages of the current issue online. The digital edition extends the paper's reach beyond the town's letterboxes to former residents, second-home owners and the wider Sherborne diaspora created by its boarding schools, and back issues have also been carried on digital magazine platforms. For a free title whose advertisers are selling to a defined local market, the online edition serves as both a showcase and an archive, demonstrating the paper's production values to businesses considering advertising in print.
The website also functions as the title's public face between issues, the point of contact for contributors and advertisers in a publishing operation that, in the independent tradition, is run by a small team without a public high-street newsroom of the kind the old paid weeklies maintained.
Launch of the Bridport Times
In January 2018 the Sherborne model was exported for the first time. Bridport, about twenty miles to the south-west, had lost its free weekly, the View From Bridport, when the View From series ceased publication at the start of that month with the loss of around twenty jobs across the group. The first edition of the Bridport Times was produced as a sister title to the Sherborne Times, with the same editor, the same free monthly frequency and the same lifestyle-led content. Its editor recorded that the idea had been taking shape for nearly two years before the first 72-page edition appeared.
The expansion demonstrated both the portability of the format and its limits. A monthly celebration could be created for a second town using the Sherborne template and team, but it was not a replacement for a weekly news service, a gap in Bridport that was otherwise filled by the Newsquest-owned Bridport and Lyme Regis News, operating from the Dorset Echo's office in Weymouth. The two Times titles instead occupied the feature and lifestyle space that the closure of the weeklies had left emptier.
Place in Dorset's Media Landscape
The Sherborne Times belongs to a small group of independent community publications that emerged in Dorset as the large regional groups retrenched. Its survival from 2008 through the following decade and beyond, in a period when Dorset lost numerous weekly titles and newspaper offices, rests on a distinct formula: free distribution, monthly frequency, high pagination, lifestyle content supplied substantially by local contributors, and an explicitly positive editorial stance that sets it apart from news titles.
For Sherborne itself, a town whose earlier newspaper history includes the Sherborne Mercury, one of the great provincial papers of the eighteenth century and an ancestor of the Western Gazette, the Times represents a modest but durable modern chapter: not a paper of record, and not attempting to be, but a monthly showcase for the people and businesses of a small, historic and unusually self-contained Dorset town.
Availability
The Sherborne Times is published monthly and distributed free in Sherborne, Dorset, England, with a digital edition of each issue available through its website. It is an independent title, founded in 2008, and since January 2018 has been the sister paper of the Bridport Times, serving the same county with the same feature-led approach.
