SomersetLive

About SomersetLive

SomersetLive is the county-wide digital news brand serving Somerset in the West of England. Launched in 2016 by Trinity Mirror — now Reach plc — the site was created by merging the websites of eight weekly newspapers across the county into a single platform, and it now also covers parts of neighbouring Dorset and Wiltshire. Based around Taunton, the county town, SomersetLive delivers rolling local news, sport, What's On, traffic and lifestyle content in the high-volume digital style of Reach's "Live" network of regional websites.

The site is one of the earliest examples of the county-brand consolidation that reshaped the British regional press in the mid-2010s, when publishers replaced dozens of individual newspaper websites with a smaller number of powerful digital brands. Owned by Reach plc, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, SomersetLive sits alongside sister sites including Gloucestershire Live, Devon Live, Cornwall Live, Essex Live and Kent Live. Its history encapsulates both the industrial logic of digital consolidation — bigger audiences, shared technology, sustainable economics — and the human cost, with around 14 editorial jobs lost across the South West in the restructuring that created it.

History and Founding

SomersetLive was created in 2016 from the merger of the websites of eight weekly newspapers in Somerset: the Central Somerset Gazette, Cheddar Valley Gazette, Frome Standard, Somerset Guardian, Wells Journal, Western Gazette, North Somerset Mercury and Shepton Mallet Journal. The consolidation was part of a restructuring of Trinity Mirror's newly acquired South West titles — former Local World newspapers — which saw 13 websites merged into three new digital offerings, alongside the creation of Gloucestershire Live from the Gloucester Citizen, Gloucestershire Echo and Stroud Life.

Trinity Mirror said the new sites would focus on rolling local news, weather, traffic, What's On, lifestyle and more, providing "the same hyperlocal news, and more, on a bigger, better and more accessible digital platform." The company argued the template had worked well at its titles elsewhere in the UK, where readers were increasingly coming to its platforms first for news. The restructuring put around 14 editorial roles at risk across the region, though the company said some new digital roles would be created.

The launch followed the same model Trinity Mirror had already applied in creating the county-wide Live brands, and Somerset Live was later joined in the West Country stable by Devon Live and Cornwall Live. In 2018 the Bath Chronicle's website was absorbed into the Somerset Live platform, further extending its footprint.

Mission and Coverage Focus

SomersetLive's mission is to be the single digital destination for news across Somerset — from the Mendip Hills to the Somerset Levels, from the Quantocks to the coast — with additional coverage of neighbouring parts of Dorset and Wiltshire. Its reporting spans breaking news, crime and courts, local politics, the work of Somerset Council (the unitary authority created in 2023), health, education, farming and the rural economy, alongside sport and a large What's On and lifestyle operation.

Somerset's character shapes the agenda: the agricultural shows and rural life of the Levels, the tourism economies of Cheddar, Wells and the coast, the nuclear new-build at Hinkley Point — one of Europe's largest construction projects — and the county's festival culture, crowned by Glastonbury, all feature heavily. The site's "In Your Area" sections allow readers to filter coverage to their own town or district.

Sport coverage includes the county's football clubs — notably Yeovil Town — along with Somerset County Cricket Club, one of the first-class counties, whose fortunes are followed closely, and the wider sporting life of the West Country.

Ownership and Funding

SomersetLive is owned by Reach plc, the London Stock Exchange-listed publisher formed as Trinity Mirror in 1999 through the merger of Trinity International Holdings and Mirror Group Newspapers, and renamed Reach in 2018. Reach is the UK's largest commercial news publisher, with national titles including the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star and OK! magazine, and a regional portfolio including the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, BirminghamLive and dozens of Live-branded county sites.

The group's regional expansion was driven by the 2015 acquisition of Local World, which brought 87 titles — including the Somerset weeklies whose websites became SomersetLive — into the company and made it the UK's biggest newspaper group. The 2018 purchase of Northern & Shell's publishing assets added the Express and Star titles to the portfolio.

The site is funded through digital advertising — display, video, newsletter and content marketing — sold as part of Reach's regional and national packages. The company's online network reaches more than 38 million people a month, giving county brands like SomersetLive the scale to attract advertisers that individual weekly newspaper websites could not.

Editorial Approach

SomersetLive practises the digital-first, high-volume local journalism of the Reach Live network: news published continuously through the day, live blogs for breaking incidents, major events and court cases, and heavy distribution through Facebook and other social platforms. Its journalists are multimedia reporters producing text, images and video for web, app and social channels.

The editorial mix blends traditional local reporting — councils, courts, police, schools, the NHS — with the consumer and lifestyle content that powers digital reach: property stories, food and drink, days out, nostalgia and the What's On guides that serve Somerset's tourism economy. The formula is designed to serve both the civic need for accountable local journalism and the commercial need for large, engaged audiences.

The absorption of the Bath Chronicle's site into SomersetLive in 2018 illustrated the continuing logic of consolidation: fewer, larger digital brands, each serving a wider geography than any single print title, with newsrooms reorganised around digital output rather than print deadlines.

Audience and Reach

Somerset has a population of around 570,000, plus the areas of Dorset and Wiltshire the site also covers, and SomersetLive is positioned as the digital news source for the whole of that footprint. Its audience includes the market towns and rural communities historically served by the eight weekly titles — from Frome and Shepton Mallet to Wells, Cheddar, Yeovil and Taunton — now aggregated into a single county-wide readership.

As part of the Reach network, the site benefits from the group's enormous collective digital audience and from the cross-promotion and shared technology of the Live platform. Its social media following, particularly on Facebook, is a primary driver of traffic, consistent with the network's strategy of reaching readers on the platforms they already use.

The site's coverage of major national-interest stories within its patch — above all the Glastonbury Festival and the Hinkley Point C construction — periodically brings it audiences far beyond Somerset, as readers across the UK seek local reporting on events of national significance.

Digital Innovation

In May 2017 Somerset Live and Gloucestershire Live became the first of Trinity Mirror's county-wide sites to be upgraded to the new responsive "Chameleon" platform, which adapted automatically to desktop, tablet and mobile. Articles loaded twice as quickly, increasing the impact of live blogs, and the new framework offered better advertisement viewability — improvements the company then planned to roll out across its other regional sites through 2017.

The site's own announcement of the upgrade emphasised continuity of content with improved presentation: the same local news, sport and What's On, now in a format that fitted any screen, with bigger pictures showcasing the county and a faster video player. The upgrade was presented as part of an ongoing programme of digital investment in the regional titles.

Like its sister sites, SomersetLive operates within Reach's centralised digital infrastructure, with apps, newsletters, push alerts and the "In Your Area" hyperlocal platform forming the toolkit for building direct, loyal audience relationships.

Notable Coverage

SomersetLive's patch gives it some of the most distinctive stories in English regional journalism. The Glastonbury Festival at Pilton — the world's most famous music festival — generates enormous coverage each year, from ticket sales to the line-up to the event itself. Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power station under construction on the Somerset coast, is a multi-decade story of jobs, investment, environmental debate and infrastructure pressure.

The site covers Somerset Council and the district councils it replaced, the police and courts, the NHS, and the rural economy — farming, food production and the agricultural shows that punctuate the county calendar. Flooding on the Somerset Levels, which has repeatedly made national headlines, is a recurring major story requiring sustained, knowledgeable local reporting.

Sport coverage spans Somerset County Cricket Club's pursuit of a first County Championship title — one of the great unfinished stories of English cricket — alongside Yeovil Town, Bath Rugby's near neighbours and the grassroots sporting life of the county.

Community Impact

The creation of SomersetLive preserved professional journalism across a large rural county where eight separate weekly newspaper websites had become economically unviable. Its reporters continue to cover the courts, councils and community stories that hold local power to account — the planning decisions, the school closures, the health service changes — that define daily life in Somerset's towns and villages.

The site's scale amplifies Somerset stories: local campaigns on infrastructure, public services and the environment reach a county-wide audience and beyond, while its What's On coverage supports the tourism and hospitality businesses central to the county's economy. For communities that lost their dedicated newspaper websites in the consolidation, the "In Your Area" sections offer a way to stay connected to hyperlocal news within the larger platform.

The consolidation was not cost-free — the restructuring that created the site put around 14 editorial jobs at risk across the South West — and the tension between digital scale and local depth remains the central challenge of the county-brand model.

Recent Developments

SomersetLive continues as an established brand within Reach's Live network, serving Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire readers daily. The site operates in the context of Reach's continuing digital transformation — navigating the decline of print, the power of platform algorithms, and the industry-wide search for sustainable models of local journalism.

Local government reorganisation has reshaped the site's civic beat: the creation of the unitary Somerset Council in 2023, replacing the county council and four district councils, concentrated local political power in a single authority based in Taunton — a significant story the site has covered closely. As the economics of local news continue to evolve, SomersetLive's combination of county scale and hyperlocal filtering remains Reach's answer to the question of how to sustain journalism across rural England.