Teignmouth Post & Gazette: Teignmouth's Weekly Paper in the Tindle Stable
The Teignmouth Post & Gazette is the weekly newspaper for Teignmouth in Devon, England, published by Tindle Newspapers as the Teignmouth Post and online at teignmouth-today.co.uk. Teignmouth is a seaside town on the South Devon coast at the mouth of the River Teign, and its paper forms part of a close-knit South Devon publishing family: the Post is a sister title of the Mid Devon Advertiser in Newton Abbot and of the Dawlish Gazette, together covering the Teignbridge coast and hinterland.
The Post is a paid-for weekly with a documented place in Devon newspaper history: the Devon Heritage Centre's newspaper collections include holdings of the Teignmouth Post dating from 1886. In its modern form it has won attention for something rare in contemporary local journalism — rising sales. A report by the paper itself recorded average sales climbing week by week to a readership of nearly 4,000, making it one of the best performers in the whole Tindle group at the time.
Overview
The Teignmouth Post serves Teignmouth and its immediate area as a weekly title within Tindle's Devon operation. Its sister papers define its patch. The Mid Devon Advertiser, based in Newton Abbot and founded in 1863, serves the surrounding Teignbridge area including Ashburton, Bovey Tracey, Moretonhampstead, Teignmouth and Dawlish, and reference works list its sister newspapers as the Dawlish Post and the Teignmouth Post. The three titles together give Tindle a coastal and inland weekly network in South Devon: the Advertiser for Newton Abbot and the Teign valley, the Gazette for Dawlish, and the Post for Teignmouth.
Within that network the Post's distinct identity is the town on its masthead. Teignmouth has its own council, harbour, seafront, schools and clubs, and the Post's job is to report them specifically, rather than as a subsection of a county paper. The Gazette element of the directory name used for this title reflects the naming traditions of Devon's local press, where Post and Gazette titles have existed side by side in the county's towns for well over a century.
History
The surviving archival record gives the Teignmouth Post a nineteenth-century pedigree. The Devon Heritage Centre's information leaflet on its newspaper collections lists the Teignmouth Post with holdings from 1886 to 1950 — evidence that a paper of this name was publishing in the town in the reign of Queen Victoria and was considered worth preserving on microfilm alongside Devon's other historic titles. That run places the Post among the generations of South Devon papers that reported the growth of Teignmouth as a resort and port.
The paper's more recent history is bound up with its sister series. The Mid Devon Advertiser began in 1863 as the Newton Weekly Journal, became the East & South Devon Advertiser in 1870, took its present name in 1906, and changed hands repeatedly in the twentieth century — including periods under Beaverbrook Newspapers and the Mirror Group — before being bought by the Tindle Newspaper Group after a series of changes between 1969 and 1981. The Teignmouth Post shares that Tindle home: IPSO's publisher listing for Tindle includes the Teignmouth Post in its Mid Devon group alongside the Dawlish Gazette and the Mid Devon Advertiser, under the Devon (Mid) heading.
Under Tindle, the Post's modern story includes measurable success. Reporting by the paper on its own performance — under the headline message that with readers' support it was bucking the trend — described most newspapers losing readers while the Post gained them, with average sales up by another 55 a week in April of the year reported, giving a readership of nearly 4,000. In a group then numbering more than two hundred titles nationwide, the Post was counted among the best performers.
Ownership and Publisher
The Teignmouth Post is published by Tindle Newspapers, the family group founded by Sir Ray Tindle. Sir Ray began his publishing career running a newspaper on the troop ship taking him to the Far East during the Second World War, bought his first title, the Tooting & Balham Gazette, with his £300 demob payment, and built the group through launches and acquisitions of small, often long-established local papers. He stepped down as chairman at ninety, remaining president, with his son Owen Tindle taking over.
Within Tindle, the Post sat in the Devon and Cornwall operation. Sandra Perraton, managing director of Devon & Cornwall Newspapers, was the senior figure quoted when the Post reported its rising sales, thanking staff, contributors and loyal readers and affirming the group's belief that local newspapers still had an important role despite difficult times for print journalism. Tindle's titles are regulated through IPSO, whose annual statement lists the Teignmouth Post among the group's newspapers.
In April 2026 Tindle announced the sale of its newspaper and digital publishing businesses to a joint venture between Iliffe Media Group and the Fowler family. Owen Tindle presented the change as the best strategy for the group's much-loved local brands to succeed in the long term, keeping them in private, family ownership with a commitment to community-focused journalism.
Coverage and Content
The Post covers Teignmouth: town news, council affairs, the seafront and harbour, schools, local sport, events, business and community life in a working port and resort. Its position in the Advertiser series means its reporters also work within a wider Teignbridge brief, but its front pages are Teignmouth's — the stories that matter on the town's streets, from planning and transport to the RNLI, regattas, clubs and societies that fill a coastal town's calendar.
Its content reaches audiences beyond its own readership through the Teignbridge Talking Newspaper. Dyrons Journal, the talking newspaper based in Newton Abbot, provides visually impaired people in the Teignbridge area with weekly recordings of local news drawn from the Mid-Devon Advertiser, the Teignmouth Post and the Dawlish Gazette — about ninety minutes of local news recorded each week and dispatched on USB memory sticks. The Post's journalism is thus part of the accessible-news infrastructure of the district as well as its print landscape.
Community Role
For a town of Teignmouth's size, a dedicated weekly is a civic asset: it reports the council whose decisions shape the seafront, the clubs whose results residents look for, and the campaigns — over piers, promenades, road schemes and services — that animate local debate. The Post's reported sales growth suggests a community choosing to keep buying that asset. Its own management attributed the performance to staff, contributors and loyal readers together, framing the paper as a shared enterprise between publisher and town.
The talking newspaper connection deepens that role. Because Dyrons Journal reads from the Post each week, the paper's reporting reaches residents who cannot read print, ensuring that blind and visually impaired people in Teignbridge receive the same Teignmouth news as everyone else. A local paper's community role is often asserted; in the Post's case it is documented in the working arrangements of another community organisation.
Print and Digital Presence
In print the Post is a paid-for weekly, sold in Teignmouth — its own report quantified performance in average weekly sales, with readership approaching 4,000 at the time of its growth report. It publishes within the production systems of Tindle's South Devon series, sharing resources with the Mid Devon Advertiser and Dawlish titles while keeping its own masthead and front page.
Digitally, Teignmouth's Tindle news presence is at teignmouth-today.co.uk, following the today naming pattern used by the group's South West websites. The site extends the Post beyond its weekly cycle, carrying Teignmouth news as it happens and giving the title a presence for former residents, visitors and the wider Devon audience who follow the coast's news online.
Audience and Reach
The Post's audience is Teignmouth itself: residents of the town and its neighbouring communities, plus the seasonal audience a resort generates. A readership of nearly 4,000 in a town of Teignmouth's scale represents deep penetration — a substantial share of local households encountering the paper each week, whether as buyers or as readers of shared copies.
Being named one of the best performers in a group of more than two hundred titles, as the Post was when its sales rose, indicates that its reach was growing against the industry trend at that time. For local advertisers, the Post offers the concentrated attention of a single town; for the publisher, it demonstrated that a small paid-for weekly with genuinely local content could still add readers.
Notable People
Sandra Perraton is the senior publishing figure publicly associated with the Post's modern success, as managing director of Devon & Cornwall Newspapers, the Tindle division responsible for the title, and earlier as a Tindle assistant managing director involved in the sister Mid-Devon Advertiser's 150th anniversary celebrations in 2013. Her comments on the Post's performance — thanking staff, contributors and readers — are the public voice of the paper's management in its growth period.
Behind the title stands Sir Ray Tindle himself, whose motto Noli Cedere — Never Surrender — was carried across his newspapers, and whose debt-free, self-financed approach to buying small papers shaped the group the Post belongs to. His son Owen Tindle succeeded him as chairman and led the group into its 2026 sale process.
Recent Developments
The Post's recent history is the history of its series and its owner. The Mid Devon Advertiser series marked 150 years of publishing in 2013, with celebrations across Teignbridge in which the Post's sister titles took part. Tindle's founder died at ninety-five, his son Owen having taken over as chairman. And in April 2026 came the announcement that Tindle's newspaper businesses — thirty titles and their digital platforms across Wales, the West Country, Surrey, Hampshire and the Isle of Man — would be acquired by the Iliffe Media and Fowler family joint venture, which has built subscription-based digital models elsewhere and pledges a long-term commitment to independent, community-focused journalism.
For Teignmouth, the paper's trajectory remains the one its own report described: a small-town weekly that, with its readers' support, has aimed to buck the trend of local newspaper decline. From the copies preserved at the Devon Heritage Centre from 1886 onwards to the website read today, the Teignmouth Post has been the town's record of itself — and its recent chapters suggest a readership determined to keep it that way.
