yourcanterbury
Overview
yourcanterbury was a free weekly newspaper for Canterbury in Kent, England, published by KOS Media as part of the publisher's 'Your' series of free midweek papers. Directory listings record that it was launched on 12 September 2007, in the first wave of the series, and that its editorial area covered Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay. It described itself on its cover as the newspaper for Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay and surrounding villages. It appeared on Wednesdays, was produced from the publisher's base at Smeeth, near Ashford, and was accompanied by the website yourcanterbury.co.uk.
The title had two lives. From 2007 until January 2011 it was a printed free paper, distributed through pick-up points in its three towns. After KOS Media, by then owned by Archant, stopped printing most of the 'Your' series, it continued as an online e-edition, reaching at least issue 209 in October 2011. A defunct-newspapers listing records its final closure in December 2012, with 269 archived editions preserved. It is therefore written about in the past tense.
Publisher and Origins
KOS Media was set up in 2002 by Paul Stannard, formerly an executive with Adscene, Kent Regional Newspapers and Trinity Mirror Southern, and its first paper was the free Kent on Sunday. Based at Smeeth, near Ashford, the company grew into the principal challenger to the family-owned KM Group in Kent. Archant held a minority interest from 2005, invested £215,000 in 2008 and a further £300,000 in 2009, and bought the company outright in June 2010. At the takeover the business employed around 70 full-time staff and published, alongside its newspapers, magazines, websites, mobile products and an internet television service.
The 'Your' launch of 2007 was a £1 million project to create eight new free weeklies across Kent in early September, covering Canterbury alongside Ashford, Dover, Folkestone's Shepway district, Maidstone, Medway, Swale and Thanet. Editorial director Ian Patel explained at the time that each paper would have a website and online video service, that readers would be invited to submit videos, and that the group hoped the technology would attract younger readers. The Canterbury title's recorded launch date of 12 September 2007 fits that early-September rollout, even though one batch listing elsewhere has sometimes misdated it to 2009; the directory date, the 2007 trade coverage and the paper's own issue numbering all place it in 2007.
The Print Paper
In print, yourcanterbury followed the series formula: a free midweek newspaper, available from Wednesday, picked up free rather than delivered or sold. The publisher said at launch that each title's print run was intended to match the circulation or distribution of the traditional paper of record in its area, and the 'Your' titles together later had a reported print run of around 100,000 copies a week. Like the rest of the series it remained free throughout the period when, from June 2009, the publisher's weekend papers Kent on Saturday and Kent on Sunday became paid-for in newsagents while free copies went to business rounds and home delivery.
The e-edition that preserved the paper's later issues shows a substantial product. Issue 209, dated 12 October 2011, listed news across pages 2 to 24, comment and feedback, a Business Week section, a Keep Kent Working feature, jobs and notices, and then the Kent Weekend magazine material, including an interview, a Kent Remembered history feature, food and drink, homes and a long driving section running to page 79. A free paper that had begun as a Wednesday pick-up had become, in its online form, a package of local news wrapped in county-wide lifestyle, property and motoring content.
Coverage and Content
The local news pages were the paper's reason for existing. Issue 174, dated 9 February 2011, led on a Herne Bay court story: a 21-year-old woman from Herne Street, Herne Bay, jailed for 18 months for a series of burglaries, thefts and a fraud in the area, including the theft of jewellery of great sentimental value. Reporting of that kind — courts, council decisions and neighbourhood crime across Canterbury and its two coastal towns — filled the front of the book, while the shared county sections behind it carried business, jobs, homes, cars and leisure.
The paper also made room for small, distinctive local enterprise. In February 2010 it interviewed a Whitstable artisan baker about his slow bread, a piece the baker himself linked to from his own website, directing readers to page 12 of the 10 February issue. That mixture of hard local news and small-business feature writing was characteristic of the series, which presented itself as a community platform as well as a news sheet, inviting contributions and promoting its video service, yourkenttv.co.uk, and its free mobile news apps inside its own pages.
Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay
Few free papers in Britain covered a city with a longer history. Canterbury Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was founded in 597, completely rebuilt between 1070 and 1077, and rebuilt again in Gothic style after a fire in 1174, with extensions to receive the pilgrims who visited the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in the cathedral in 1170. The city the paper served was also a university and tourism centre whose medieval streets, city walls and St Augustine's Abbey formed part of a World Heritage Site, giving a small weekly an unusually weighty backdrop of heritage, planning and visitor-economy stories.
The two coastal towns widened the brief. Canterbury and Whitstable had been linked since 1830 by the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, described as the world's first passenger railway, and Whitstable's identity rested on its harbour and its seafaring and fishing heritage. Herne Bay, by contrast, had begun as a small fishing community before developers in the 1830s built a pleasure pier and promenade to attract visitors from the paddle steamers passing between London and Margate; its seafront clock tower, funded by a donation in 1837, has been described as the first freestanding, purpose-built clock tower in the world. One paper thus had to cover a cathedral city, a working harbour town and a Victorian resort at once.
Digital Presence
yourcanterbury was digital from birth: its website carried the same branding, its pages promoted online video through YourKentTV, and readers were offered news on mobile phones. When printing ended in January 2011, the Canterbury title was one of the papers the publisher named as continuing online only, produced as a page-turning e-edition using PageSuite technology. The publisher said web traffic rose by 50 per cent in the three months after the change and that around 180,000 people a week accessed the e-editions, while acknowledging internally that total readership was understood to have fallen.
Content from the Canterbury site continued to surface after the e-edition period: a 2013 entertainment article on the yourcanterbury.co.uk domain, comparing the street magicians Dynamo and David Blaine, was credited to Marijke Cox and Chris Britcher, the latter a senior KOS journalist who edited the Ashford title at its launch and later edited Kent on Sunday. The bylines illustrate how the 'Your' websites fed into the publisher's wider Kent news operation after the separate printed papers disappeared.
End of Publication
The paper's decline followed the economics of its publisher. In December 2010, after the Archant takeover, KOS Media announced an editorial restructure in response to challenging trading conditions, with eight jobs at risk. The January 2011 switch from print to e-edition was presented by managing director Paul Stannard not as a printing-cost saving but as a way to invest in the flagship Saturday and Sunday papers, and to experiment with forms such as video inside the e-editions. For Canterbury readers, however, the practical effect was the loss of the free printed weekly they had picked up since 2007.
The defunct-newspapers listing records Your Canterbury closing in December 2012, with 269 editions archived — a run consistent with a weekly paper that appeared from September 2007 through its print and e-edition years. There was no successor under the same name. Canterbury's local news reverted to the established pattern of the KM Group's paid titles and, increasingly, to county-wide online publishing, in which a dedicated Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay free weekly no longer had a place.
Place in Kent Media
yourcanterbury matters because it shows how far the late-2000s free-paper experiment reached. The 'Your' series put a named, locally badged weekly into a historic cathedral city and its satellite resorts, backed by a publisher whose titles, the company noted at its acquisition, had won more than ten national awards including UK free weekly newspaper of the year six times. For its readers, the paper's archive — hundreds of editions preserving court reports, council news, business features and small-trader interviews from 2007 onwards — remains a record of everyday life in east Kent in the years when print, e-editions and early mobile news briefly overlapped.
