Your Leek Paper
Your Leek Paper was an independent weekly newspaper serving the Staffordshire market town of Leek and its surrounding villages. It was launched on 25 June 2003 by a group of former employees of the town's established weekly, the Leek Post & Times, who had left that paper after it was sold to a national group and who sank some of their redundancy money into starting a rival of their own. Billed as "For the People of Leek – By the People of Leek", the paper grew from an initial sale of under 4,000 copies to almost 5,000 a week, was bought by the Iliffe newspaper group in 2006, and was closed as a stand-alone title in November 2011, when it was merged into the Leek Post & Times — the very paper it had been created to compete against.
Background: the sale of the Post & Times
Leek's newspaper tradition rested on the Leek Post & Times, a weekly first published as the Leek Times in 1870 and formed in its later shape by a merger with the Leek Post in 1936. For many years the paper was produced by Hill Brothers (Leek) Ltd — Hill Bros — a family firm embedded in the town. That changed in 2003, when Hill Bros sold the Post & Times to the Northcliffe group, the regional publishing arm of the Daily Mail's owners, which ran the paper as part of its Staffordshire Sentinel Newspapers operation alongside The Sentinel in Stoke-on-Trent.
The takeover prompted a group of Post & Times staff to leave. Among them was the paper's editor, Gary Shenton, who had worked for Hill Bros for 32 years and edited the Post & Times itself. Offered a post on the sub-editors' desk at The Sentinel after the takeover, he chose instead to take redundancy. Several of those who left decided that Leek still needed a newspaper run by the people who lived and worked there — and that they would start it themselves.
The launch in 2003
The new venture was set in motion when Alan Lyford, the former production manager of the Post & Times, telephoned Shenton in January 2003 and asked whether he fancied editing a new weekly paper. Shenton agreed, and became the first editor of Your Leek Paper. The paper was owned by six equal shareholders, all of them former Post & Times staff, together with a silent partner; at launch it had a staff of seven, including one full-time reporter, with plans to take on another.
Your Leek Paper was first published on 25 June 2003. Its first edition ran to 32 pages. To establish itself, the paper gave away 10,000 copies free for its first two weeks, after which it settled as a paid-for weekly with an initial print run of 7,500 and a cover price of 30p. Its front page promised a paper for the community to be involved with, and a vehicle through which local people could express their views. The launch was a success: the giveaway copies all but disappeared, the paper reported a stream of supportive telephone calls, and it received messages from former residents as far away as San Francisco and Canada who had seen the new title on the internet. Initial sales were 3,750 copies a week — respectable for a start-up in a small market town, and the beginning of steady growth.
Growth and the 100th issue
The paper's growth was recorded in its audited sales. From the initial 3,750, circulation rose to 4,569 copies a week for the July to December 2004 audit period, and the team expected a significant further increase when the next audit results were published. By the time Your Leek Paper published its 100th issue, it had expanded from 32 pages to 48 pages and from a handful of founders to 20 full- or part-time members of staff. Marking the milestone with a front-page story, the paper also used Local Newspaper Week to publish a series of articles about journalism and the newspaper industry itself.
Editor Gary Shenton attributed the paper's appeal to the balance and fairness of its reporting, something he said readers repeatedly congratulated the paper on and which the staff intended to safeguard. He also articulated the philosophy behind the title: the majority of its staff either lived in Leek or had worked there all their lives, drove the same roads, shopped in the same supermarkets and shared the same problems as their readers. That, in his words, was what a local newspaper should be about. The paper's slogan made the same point in eight words: "For the People of Leek – By the People of Leek".
Sale to Iliffe
Your Leek Paper's success as an independent soon attracted a larger buyer. In 2006 the title was acquired by Iliffe News and Media Ltd, the publishing subsidiary of the Yattendon Investment Trust, and became part of Staffordshire Newspapers Ltd, the group behind the Burton Mail, the Ashbourne News Telegraph, the Uttoxeter Advertiser, the Staffordshire Newsletter and the Black Country Bugle. Announcing the deal, Iliffe's group publishing director David Fordham described Your Leek Paper as an excellent fit for the Staffordshire portfolio, noting that in a relatively short period it had established a good reputation and following in the Leek community, on whose firm footing the group hoped to build.
The sale resulted in a small number of redundancies, but Shenton stayed on as editor and retained the same editorial team, and he welcomed the move as a chance to market the paper better and take it forward. The broader business he and his co-founders had built also passed to Iliffe: by then Your Leek Paper Ltd published not only the weekly newspaper but a quarterly A4 glossy magazine, Times Gone By, and operated a design agency and print management division producing artwork, newsletters, town guides and corporate brochures, with a web-based business magazine as its most recent initiative. What had begun as a breakaway newsroom had become a small diversified local media business.
The merger of 2011 and closure
The final chapter of Your Leek Paper's story began in June 2011, when Iliffe bought the Leek Post & Times itself from Northcliffe for a seven-figure sum. The two Leek rivals were now under the same ownership, and in November 2011 Iliffe announced that Your Leek Paper would cease publication as a stand-alone title and be merged into the Post & Times. The announcement was carried in the paper's own pages in its final edition in late November 2011: from the following week, it told readers, Your Leek Paper would be incorporated into the Leek Post & Times, the combined newspaper would be developed and grown, and a new joint website would carry the content of both at leek-news.co.uk.
By then the paper's most recently audited circulation was 2,866 copies a week, down from its height of 4,569. Its old rival, the Post & Times, was selling an average of 11,419 copies a week on the most recent ABC figures. Founder Alan Lyford said he was very sad to see Your Leek Paper go, as he had expected it to be around for a lot longer, while acknowledging that these were tough times for the media, as for most businesses. It was not made clear at the time whether jobs would be affected by the merger.
Ownership and staffing
Your Leek Paper's structure reflected its origins. It was founded by six equal shareholders, all former Post & Times employees, together with a silent partner, and its first editor, Gary Shenton, was himself one of the six. The launch team numbered seven, including one reporter, and grew with the paper: by its 100th issue it employed 20 full- or part-time staff. That growth — in pages, from 32 to 48, as well as in people — was funded by a rising sale, and it is notable that the paper's expansion took place while competing in a single small town against a title owned first by a family firm and then by a national group.
The Leek newspaper market
Leek's market was unusually competitive for a town of its size. The Leek Post & Times formed part of a series with the Cheadle Post & Times and the Uttoxeter Post & Times, which together sold around 18,000 copies a week when a new series editor was appointed in 2007; the Post & Times later moved to refurbished offices in the town's Smithfield Centre. Into this market Your Leek Paper inserted itself as the locally owned alternative, and for eight years the town supported two rival weeklies — one the historic title dating back to 1870, the other a start-up created by that title's own former staff. Few British towns of comparable size sustained such direct competition in the 2000s, which is precisely what made the Leek experiment a story followed by the journalism trade press throughout the paper's life.
What the merger meant for readers
For readers, the 2011 merger was presented as continuity rather than disappearance. The final edition of Your Leek Paper explained that the title would be incorporated into the Leek Post & Times from the following week, that the owners planned to grow the combined newspaper, and that readers were invited to contribute ideas about what they would like to see in it. A new joint website, leek-news.co.uk, was to carry the content of both papers online. The name Your Leek Paper ceased to appear as a stand-alone masthead, but its readers, and the market it had proved existed for a second Leek weekly, passed to the combined title.
Assessment and legacy
Your Leek Paper's eight and a half years of life make it a compact case study in the economics of British local newspapers in the 2000s. It demonstrated that experienced local journalists, starting with redundancy money and a deep knowledge of their town, could launch a paid weekly from nothing and build it to nearly 5,000 sales against an established competitor owned by a national group — a feat that contemporaries in the trade press described as a paper set up with redundancy money proving too good for a big news group to miss out on. Its purchase by Iliffe after only three years was a measure of that achievement.
Yet the same story also shows the limits of the model. Once both Leek titles belonged to one owner, there was no commercial logic in publishing two competing weeklies in a town of Leek's size, and the younger, smaller title was the one absorbed. The paper's founding idea survived its closure in a limited sense: its content, staff tradition and readers were folded into the combined Leek Post & Times, and the joint website promised at the merger carried the town's news forward under the older paper's name. Your Leek Paper is remembered in the trade principally for the manner of its birth — a newsroom that refused to accept the end of locally run journalism in its town, and built a successful newspaper of its own instead.
