Wear Valley Mercury

Overview

The Wear Valley Mercury was an independent weekly newspaper serving the Wear Valley area of County Durham, in the north east of England. Launched in September 2006, it was a sister title to the Teesdale Mercury, the long-established weekly based in Barnard Castle, and it shared that paper's independent ownership under Lord Barnard. The Mercury was based in Crook and covered the market towns and villages of the Wear Valley, including Crook, Willington, Wolsingham and West Auckland, together with communities west of Bishop Auckland. It was a small paper — at its closure it sold fewer than 2,000 copies a week — but it quickly acquired a reputation for campaigning journalism out of proportion to its size, most famously through a petition against the downgrading of Bishop Auckland Hospital that attracted more signatures than the paper had readers many times over. Hit by the difficult economic conditions facing the local press, the Wear Valley Mercury closed in December 2011, a little over five years after its launch.

Origins as a Sister Title

The Wear Valley Mercury grew out of one of England's most durable independent newspapers. The Teesdale Mercury had been published from Barnard Castle since 1854 and was owned by the Vane family, the family of Lord Barnard of Raby Castle in County Durham. By the middle of the 2000s, according to its editor Adrian Braddy, the Teesdale title's circulation had effectively reached saturation point in its own territory: there were few households in Teesdale left to convert. Looking for growth, the company examined a number of options and concluded that launching a new title in the neighbouring Wear Valley made geographical sense. The Wear Valley, Braddy argued, was poorly served by the media. The new paper was planned as a genuine expansion, creating six jobs, two of them for journalists, at a time when much of the regional press was cutting staff rather than hiring.

The Launch

The first edition of the Wear Valley Mercury appeared in September 2006. Around 3,000 copies were distributed to newsagents in Crook and Willington and in the villages west of Bishop Auckland, and the early signs were encouraging: the editor set a target of selling 1,000 copies in the first week and reported that early indications suggested the paper would beat it, with one newsagent telephoning at 8.45 on the first Friday morning to say the shop, open since 7am, had already sold out. The paper's new offices in Crook were officially opened on publication day, with the newspaper's owner, Lord Barnard, joined by the local MP and cabinet minister Hilary Armstrong, staff and local dignitaries. The launch had been prepared with an energetic local marketing campaign that put 15,000 leaflets through household letterboxes and 5,000 promotional beer mats into local pubs — a suitably grounded form of advertising for a paper aimed at close-knit former mining communities.

Format, Staffing and Production

The first edition of the Wear Valley Mercury ran to 12 pages. In physical shape it resembled the Teesdale Mercury, a format midway between tabloid and broadsheet, but it was given a more modern design and was deliberately made to look different from its sister, since some newsagents would stock both papers and the company did not want readers to confuse them. The paper went on sale every Friday at 32p, complementing the Teesdale Mercury's Wednesday publication day. It had three members of staff of its own in Crook, overseen by editor Adrian Braddy and his deputy, Naomi Bunting. Production followed the traditional pattern of the independent local press: the paper was put together in its own offices in Crook and then sent to be printed on the company's own presses at Barnard Castle. During its lifetime the paper was refreshed in appearance, at one point acquiring a colourful masthead for the first time in its history.

The Patch: The Wear Valley

The Wear Valley takes its name from the River Wear as it flows through the western part of County Durham. The Mercury's territory — Crook, Willington, Wolsingham, West Auckland and the villages around Bishop Auckland — was a landscape shaped by coal mining, whose pits had closed in the decades before the paper's launch, leaving towns with strong identities but limited local media. The area was covered, at a distance, by the region's big titles, including the Darlington-based Northern Echo, but it had no weekly newspaper of its own dedicated to its concerns. Filling that gap was the Mercury's founding purpose. Its pages dealt in the material of community life in such places: councils, schools, churches, clubs, sport and the small organisations that, as its final editor later wrote, make up daily life and hold communities together.

The Hospital Campaign

The Wear Valley Mercury is best remembered for its first campaign, launched within two years of its founding, against proposals to close the accident and emergency department at Bishop Auckland Hospital and replace it with an urgent care centre, sending emergency cases instead to Durham or Darlington. The paper's petition, headed "Hands off our A&E", drew an extraordinary response. By October 2008 more than 11,000 people had signed, and the total eventually passed 16,000. The campaign was backed by the Bishop Auckland MP Helen Goodman, who spent three weekends in the centre of Bishop Auckland collecting signatures, and it drew a message of support from the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. Editor Adrian Braddy pointed out that about one in five of the entire population of the Wear Valley had signed — a remarkable figure for a newspaper selling under 2,000 copies, and one that demonstrated how a small weekly could articulate the feelings of its community on the issue that mattered most to it.

Punching Above Its Weight

The hospital campaign defined the Mercury's reputation. When the paper closed, the trade press observed that although it sold under 2,000 copies it regularly punched above its weight, and the petition — which on one occasion, as HoldtheFrontPage reported, gathered more than 16,000 signatures — was the clearest evidence. The episode became a small case study in the value of local newspapers: a title with a handful of staff could organise, publicise and sustain a campaign that no national outlet would have run and that gave a scattered population a single point of focus. It also showed the limits of that model, since campaigning success did not translate into circulation or advertising revenue on anything like the same scale.

People and Changes

Adrian Braddy, who had previously worked at the Galloway Gazette in south-west Scotland and at the Hartlepool Mail, edited both Mercury titles for seven years before leaving to become editor of the Craven Herald & Pioneer in North Yorkshire; Trevor Brookes succeeded him at the Mercury titles. The Wear Valley Mercury's last editor was Phil Hardy. Among the reporters who served the paper during its short life were Caroline Holmes, Alison Goulding, Duncan Leatherdale, Vicky Callaghan, Lizzie Anderson and, latterly, Ashley Barnard — a roll-call its editor published with thanks in the final edition, saying that the paper's journalists had consistently gone the extra mile in trying to establish the fledgling title as a real contender in its market.

Closure in December 2011

The final edition of the Wear Valley Mercury appeared on 23 December 2011. The closure was announced by editor Phil Hardy in a first-person piece in that last issue, in which he explained that the decision had been taken to shut the newspaper because of the tough economic situation, and that the staff had accepted with deep sadness that this would be the final edition. He wrote that community newspapers like the Mercury were easy to dismiss as lightweight vehicles for church fetes and small interest groups, but that those same groups made up daily life and held communities together, and he noted that, like all businesses, newspapers were suffering in the economic climate — the Mercury had simply become its latest victim. Readers were assured that everyone involved had tried their very best. The closure came just over five years after the paper's much-celebrated launch.

Legacy

The Wear Valley Mercury's legacy rests less on its longevity than on what it demonstrated. It showed that, even in the twenty-first century, an independent publisher could identify an under-served community, launch a newspaper for it from scratch, staff it locally and print it on its own presses — and that such a paper could, within two years, mobilise a fifth of its population behind a single campaign. Its sister title endured: the Teesdale Mercury continued under the Vane family's ownership until 2024, when it was sold after 170 years, its new owner praising the value of trusted, independent local news. The Wear Valley itself was left without a weekly of its own once more, its news reverting to the pages of the region's larger titles. For historians of the local press, the Mercury remains a brief, bright example of the independent weekly at its best: small, rooted and unafraid to campaign.