yourshepway

Overview

yourshepway was a free weekly newspaper for the Shepway district of Kent, England, published by KOS Media as part of the 'Your' series of free midweek papers launched in the summer of 2007. It appeared on Wednesdays and was distributed free, with a website at yourshepway.co.uk. The district it served, centred on Folkestone and Hythe and stretching towards Romney Marsh and the Channel Tunnel terminal, was later renamed the Folkestone and Hythe district, and publisher listings summarised the paper's territory as Folkestone and Hythe. Although catalogued under Folkestone, the title was a district paper, not a single-town one.

Printing ended in January 2011, when the publisher moved the 'Your' titles to online e-editions. A defunct-newspapers listing records Your Shepway closing in December 2012, with 268 archived editions preserved. It is written about here in the past tense.

Publisher and Origins

KOS Media was founded in 2002 by Paul Stannard, formerly of Adscene, Kent Regional Newspapers and Trinity Mirror Southern, and began publishing with the free Kent on Sunday. Its 'Your' series was a £1 million project announced in 2007 to launch eight free weeklies in early September, covering Canterbury, Dover, Ashford, Maidstone, Medway, Swale, Thanet and, in the launch reporting's wording, Folkestone — the town at the heart of the Shepway title. Each paper was to have a website and an online video service, with journalists trained in video, news available by mobile phone, and copies available from pick-up bins each Wednesday.

The company was backed by Archant, a minority shareholder from 2005 which invested £215,000 in 2008 and £300,000 in 2009 and bought KOS Media outright in June 2010. In Shepway the competitive field was well established: Folkestone's paid papers included the Folkestone Herald and the Kentish Express, its free papers included the KM Group's Folkestone and Hythe Extra, and yourshepway entered that market as KOS Media's challenger. The publisher's main competitor across Kent was the same KM Group, the family-owned owner of the Extra.

The District It Served

Folkestone, the district's largest town, had been a resort with a developed shipping trade, its harbour providing cross-Channel services to Boulogne from the coming of the railway in 1843 until 2000. Its major landmark, the Leas, is a cliff-top promenade designed in the mid-1800s by Decimus Burton, lined with crescents, hotels and private parks, and connected to the beach by the Leas Lift, a Victorian water lift opened in 1885. Above the Channel Tunnel terminal at Cheriton stands the Folkestone White Horse, carved on Cheriton Hill, and a Martello tower built in 1806 against a Napoleonic invasion still stands above Copt Point.

The district's modern economy, in the paper's years, turned on the Tunnel and on services. Construction of the Channel Tunnel in the 1980s and 1990s brought employment and people to the area, and the running of Tunnel services continued to provide work; the Eurotunnel Shuttle terminal for cars to Calais stands in the Folkestone suburb of Cheriton. High-speed trains from December 2009 cut the journey from Folkestone to London to under an hour, with some trains from Folkestone West taking as little as 52 minutes. Hythe, the district's second town, lies along the Royal Military Canal, and the A259 leads west from Folkestone across Romney Marsh towards Hastings — a spread of coast, marsh and commuter territory for one district weekly to cover.

Coverage and Content

yourshepway followed the series formula visible in its archived sister editions: town and district news, comment and letters at the front of the paper, then leisure coverage and the shared sections for property, motoring, jobs and sport that carried the advertising on which a free paper depended. District news in Shepway meant Tunnel and transport stories, harbour and seafront regeneration, tourism and the arts-led revival that was bringing domestic visitors back to Kent's seaside towns, alongside the council, schools and community news of Folkestone, Hythe and the Marsh villages.

The publisher wrapped the local titles in county-wide material, including the Kent Weekend entertainment guide that accompanied its weekend papers, and promoted its YourKentTV video channel, to which readers could contribute clips, inside the papers and on their websites. At its 2010 acquisition the company noted that its newspapers had won more than ten national awards, including UK free weekly newspaper of the year six times, and the Shepway title shared in that portfolio identity even though its own journalism was resolutely district-level.

The Print Paper

As a print title, yourshepway was available free each Wednesday, and the publisher said at the series' launch that it intended each paper's print run to match the circulation or distribution of the traditional paper of record in its area; the 'Your' titles together later reported a combined print run of around 100,000 a week. The title remained free when, in June 2009, KOS Media's Saturday and Sunday papers became paid-for in newsagents, with free copies diverted to business rounds and home delivery, while the midweek papers stayed free of charge.

The print run's local significance can be judged from the market it entered. Folkestone already supported paid weeklies and a rival KM free paper, so a second free challenger made the district one of the most contested small markets in Kent. Contemporary portfolio summaries in 2009 continued to list Shepway among the eight original 'Your' territories, alongside Ashford, Canterbury, Dover, Maidstone, Medway, Swale and Thanet, even as the series expanded to Deal and Sandwich.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, yourshepway.co.uk, mirrored the printed title, and the series' launch plan had made video and mobile access part of the offer from the beginning. In January 2011, following the Archant takeover and a December 2010 editorial restructure that put eight jobs at risk in challenging trading conditions, printing of the 'Your' titles stopped and yourshepway continued as an e-edition only, produced with page-turning technology. The publisher reported a 50 per cent increase in web traffic within three months and around 180,000 people a week using the e-editions.

Managing director Paul Stannard said the decision allowed investment in the flagship Kent on Saturday and Kent on Sunday and was not related to printing costs, and that the e-editions, not confined by print, could be experimental, for example in using video within them. For Shepway readers, the change removed the free paper from the district's pick-up bins less than four years after it had arrived, leaving the website and e-edition as the title's only forms for the remainder of its life.

End of Publication

The defunct-newspapers listing records Your Shepway as a KOS Media weekly that closed in December 2012, its website yourshepway.co.uk, with 268 archived editions — the same pattern as the other 2007 launches, which mostly ended that month. The district whose name the paper carried was itself later renamed, becoming the Folkestone and Hythe district, so both the title and its territorial name have passed into history. No successor used the Shepway name in local publishing.

Place in Kent Media

yourshepway demonstrated the geographic ambition of the 'Your' series: it was a paper named not for a town but for a whole district, covering a ferry-port-turned-Tunnel town, a canal-side market town and the edge of Romney Marsh under one masthead. For five years, in print and then as an e-edition, it gave that district a free Wednesday paper from a challenger publisher in one of Kent's most competitive local markets. Its archive of 268 editions remains a week-by-week record of Shepway life — harbour, Tunnel, seafront and marsh — during the years when free print briefly flourished on the Kent coast.