Smile, fellow hacks, and celebrate a little success story. Last week a new newspaper was launched and proved to be an immediate hit, with many newsagents selling out in record time. People in the towns and villages around Crook in County Durham happily paid 32p for the first issue of the Wear Valley Mercury on Friday. Though it was expected to sell about 1,000 copies, it looks as though the paper may well sell almost all of its initial 3,000 print run.
This enthusiasm for a paid-for title runs counter to the general decline of print and the growth of freesheets. "Yes," says the Mercury editor, Adrian Braddy, "it's nice to go against the flow". He explains that the new paper is an offshoot of the Teesdale Mercury, a paper with a 152-year history which is owned by Lord Barnard. The paper, which sells 7,000 in a locality of 24,000, had reached saturation point and had also reached an "advertising ceiling". (How many papers can say that?) "So we were looking to expand," says Braddy, "and we considered at first creating a special edition for the towns to the west of Bishop Auckland. But then we thought, 'why not go the whole hog and launch a separate paper?' We'd always wanted to be a group!"
The result is the Wear Valley Mercury, a paper with a unique shape. It's not as large as a broadsheet but is larger than The Guardian's Berliner format. Composed of 12 pages, it is also deliberately designed not to look like its sister title. Though it's considered to look "more modern", I think the first edition front page has the undoubted virtue of looking as if the paper has always existed. One key reason for local interest before publication in the new paper was a marketing campaign in which 15,000 leaflets were distributed, 5,000 promotional beer mats were sent to local pubs and car stickers were given away.
But none of that would have worked unless there was an appetite for local news. Braddy points out that Crook is a town of 8,000 people and hosts the Wear Valley district council. It is a news centre that wasn't being properly served. In classic marketing terms, therefore, the Mercury management spotted a niche. Braddy tells how he took a call from a newsagent at 8.45am on Friday who told him he had sold out. "Not bad going," says the delighted editor, "considering he opened at 7am."
Sure, it's only a small affair. But ask the owners and editors of genuinely local weekly newspapers in stable communities across Britain (and Ireland) whether they have a future and the vast majority will say they do. They are still the glue that hold communities together - especially with the decline of church-going - and remain the major hope for the printed word in the coming 20 years. The story for the national press and the regional dailies (and for weeklies in areas where there is a transient population) is very different. But the tale of the Wear Valley Mercury is a reason to raise a glass this morning.
