The Wokingham Paper

Overview

The Wokingham Paper was a weekly newspaper for Wokingham in Berkshire, England, launched in March 2015. It was created by journalist Phil Creighton in direct response to the closure of the town's established newspaper, the Wokingham Times, which Trinity Mirror had shut the previous December as part of cutbacks that also ended the Reading Post. In November 2020 the paper changed its name to Wokingham Today, to match the name of its website, and it continues under that name, so the story of The Wokingham Paper is the founding chapter of a title that still serves the borough.

The paper was a notable example of the hyperlocal movement in British journalism: a news title owned and created by people who live and work in the area it covers, launched to fill a gap its founder believed no town should have to accept. Within a short time it had become, by its founder's account and by trade-press recognition, the market leader in the borough, with a reputation for breaking news and strong political reporting in the traditions of local newspaper journalism.

Background: The Closure of the Wokingham Times

Wokingham had been served for generations by the Wokingham Times, part of the Berkshire Media Group titles published from Reading. Phil Creighton had worked on the Times, and was on its staff when Trinity Mirror's cutbacks closed the title in December 2014. The same round of closures ended the Reading Post, the daily-turned-weekly that had served Reading since its days as the Reading Evening Post, where Creighton had earlier worked as features editor, devising its weekly leisure magazine.

The closure left the Berkshire Media Group's Wokingham News as the only remaining newspaper in the town at the start of 2015. Creighton, who had left the Post in 2012 to launch a hyperlocal magazine for Reading, Wokingham and Bracknell, concluded that the answer was to start a newspaper of his own for Wokingham. He folded the magazine in 2015 to launch The Wokingham Paper. The new title began life under the working title of the Wokingham Independent, a name that signalled the intention behind it.

The First Issue

The first edition of The Wokingham Paper went to print at the end of March 2015. The 48-page first edition hit the streets on Friday 27 March with a print run of 10,000 copies and a cover price of 50 pence. It was planned as a trial monthly edition, with a second edition to follow on 24 April and the aim of going weekly thereafter — a cautious launch model that allowed a small start-up team to prove demand before committing to a weekly cycle.

The launch edition contained more than 140 local stories. They included a scoop about a United States Olympic rower being reunited with his ring after twenty years, a look at traffic problems in the area, and coverage of the ongoing regeneration schemes that were reshaping Wokingham town centre. Creighton said the team were true professionals who had worked extremely hard under challenging conditions to give the people of Wokingham the best possible newspaper, and he described the launch edition, with its columnists, exclusive pictures and family-friendly contests, as a bargain at 48 pages of local news for 50 pence.

Going Weekly

The difficult second issue followed, and by early May 2015 the paper had moved to the weekly publication it had promised. The experienced newspaper reviewer Steve Dyson, assessing the title for the trade press a month after launch, noted what producing it entailed: negotiating paper, printing and transport costs; employing and paying journalists and distributors; selling advertisements and arranging copy sales; and project-managing finance, editorial, print and on-sale deadlines from scratch. Despite that start-up strain, he found at least four hard news stories in the weekly edition worthy of the front page.

The story Dyson picked out as the right lead choice was an original human-interest report about an NHS nurse forced to sleep in his car, which he called a riveting read despite the nurse's anonymity. Other front-page contenders in the same edition included anger as parking charges almost doubled, and traders' anger at roadworks. The range was the classic mixture of a local weekly: a human story with genuine pulling power, council decisions affecting readers' pockets, and the disruption of daily life by the works then under way in the town.

Editorial Character and Reputation

The Wokingham Paper quickly built a reputation, in the words of its founder's later biographical account, for breaking news, strong political reporting and sticking to the traditions of local newspaper reporting. It became the market leader in the borough. Those traditions mattered to its identity: this was a title founded by journalists who had worked on the papers it replaced, and who presented the new venture not as a novelty but as the continuation of a craft — reporting councils, courts, planning and community life in detail, on a weekly print deadline.

Recognition followed. Front pages devised by Creighton were shortlisted for Hold the Front Page's Front Page of the Year contest, winning the accolade in 2023, by which time the paper was publishing as Wokingham Today. The founder was also in demand as a commentator on Reading and Wokingham matters, appearing on national and local radio and television. For a hyperlocal start-up, such visibility helped establish the title as the voice of its town in a way that went beyond its circulation area.

Wokingham and the Borough

Wokingham is a market town in Berkshire, east of Reading, and the centre of a borough that also includes towns and villages such as Woodley, Earley, Twyford and Finchampstead. During the paper's first years the borough was experiencing rapid growth and the town centre was undergoing a major regeneration programme, subjects that gave a local weekly a steady flow of consequential stories about planning, traffic, parking and public services. The paper's early coverage of regeneration schemes and roadworks reflected the concerns of a town being physically rebuilt around its readers.

The paper served the whole borough, not only the town of Wokingham itself. Its later editions under the Today name carried news of mayoral appointments in Earley and Woodley alongside Wokingham's own civic affairs, and its reporting of local elections across the borough was central enough that its founding editor timed his eventual departure in 2024 to follow that year's local election results. Political reporting, from parish and town councils to the unitary borough council, was the backbone around which the rest of the paper was built.

Ownership and the Hyperlocal Model

The Wokingham Paper was a hyperlocal in the trade's sense of the word: a news group owned and created by people who live and work in the areas they cover. The titles were owned by a social enterprise company headed by publisher David Riley, while editorial control rested with Creighton, who devised and launched the paper and edited every edition of it for nine years. That structure — social-enterprise ownership, a resident editor, a small local team — was presented as an alternative model for local news at a time when the established groups were closing titles in towns like Wokingham.

Creighton himself argued, on stepping down, that hyperlocal news was the way forward for the industry, while noting that society still needed to figure out how it happens and how it is paid for. That tension ran through the paper's existence: the same market conditions that had killed the Wokingham Times applied to its successor, which survived by keeping its cost base local and its relationship with readers and advertisers direct. Its survival to become Wokingham Today, and to spawn a sister title, was offered as evidence that the model could work.

Renaming to Wokingham Today and a Sister Title

In November 2020 The Wokingham Paper changed its name to Wokingham Today, matching the name of its website, wokingham.today. The change brought print and digital under a single brand, following the pattern of many local titles whose online identity had become the one readers used daily. The paper itself continued as a weekly print title alongside the daily-read website, and Creighton continued as editor.

In October 2021 a sister paper, Reading Today, was launched, also edited by Creighton, to serve the neighbouring town whose daily paper, the Reading Post, had closed in the same 2014 cutbacks. On its hundredth issue in 2023, Creighton described Reading Today as the successor to the Reading Evening Post, where he had started his career in 1997, just as Wokingham Today was the successor to the Wokingham Times. The claim neatly summarised the founding idea of The Wokingham Paper: that a closed title's role in its town could be taken up again by a new one.

The Founder's Departure

In May 2024 Phil Creighton announced that he was stepping down as editor of Wokingham Today and Reading Today, after nine years in charge of the title he had launched as The Wokingham Paper in 2015. He had edited every edition of the newspaper since its launch. His last edition was to come out the following month, and the newspapers were to continue with a successor as editor. Writing in the paper, he said that after the local election results it was time for a declaration of his own, and that after nearly thirty years governed by daily, weekly and monthly print deadlines — late nights, tough press days and news breaking just as the paper was about to go to press — it was time to recharge his batteries.

His career had begun at the University of Reading, where he edited the student newspaper Spark in 1997-98, before joining the Reading Evening Post that year in an advertising role and moving into editorial after graduation. Apart from five years at the Baptist Times between 2002 and 2007, he spent his career in the Reading and Wokingham areas. He left the Today titles in June 2024 for freelance work, saying that if he were cut he would bleed newspaper ink, and that he hoped to remain within the industry.

Legacy

The Wokingham Paper matters in the recent history of British local journalism because it reversed the usual direction of travel. The 2010s were a decade in which the standard story was a group's closure of a town title; Wokingham's story was of the journalists of the closed title starting a new paper within three months, pricing it at 50 pence, filling it with more than 140 local stories, and building it into the borough's market leader. Other launches in the town followed later — a further new newspaper for Wokingham was announced years afterwards by other publishers — but they entered a market in which a locally owned weekly already existed.

As Wokingham Today, the title the paper became continues to publish weekly in print and daily online. The name The Wokingham Paper belongs to its first five and a half years, from March 2015 to November 2020, but the institution founded under that name — its newsroom, its political reporting and its claim to be the successor of the Wokingham Times — is the same one that still serves the borough today.