“It’s rubbish”: Western Gazette merges West Dorset edition
Spot the difference: Sherborne looks like it is going to be central to the Western Gazette's future coverage of West Dorset.
THE WESTERN Gazette has merged its West Dorset edition with its Sherborne edition.
The move has been badly received by readers such as Bill Gray, 60, of Bridport, who said: “It’s rubbish, that paper.”
In the 1990s, the Gazette was one of the biggest weekly newspapers in the country, with a dozen or so different editions.
But its sales have been steadily declining, and its shrinkage this spring is the latest in a series of changes ripping through the West Dorset media landscape.
The West Dorset – Sherborne merger comes three weeks after the Bridport News and Lyme Regis News moved their publication day to Wednesday and increased their pagination to 80 pages. The News titles have launched new features and initiatives, as have the competing View From free weeklies. (The View From titles also come out on Wednesday; the Gazette is published on Thursday).
The Gazette still has four reporters covering West and North Dorset, and it dedicates space to Dorset court reporting.
Gazette staff – speaking unofficially – say the merger is meant to give a better service to readers across West Dorset by providing a spread of news relevant to the whole district. Sherborne, Bridport, and Beaminster are all covered by West Dorset District Council, and all fall within the Bishopric of Sherborne. Indeed, viewed historically, Sherborne is the ancient capital of Wessex.
But, around Bridport, potential buyers were not keen to keep paying 60p for the newly merged paper. Comments included:
“It’s a waste of time.”
“They’ve killed it.”
“I’m not interested in the Western Gazette – I don’t know why anybody would buy it.”
“I suppose it depends on how much coverage poor old West Dorset gets.”
“If I was in the shop and I saw that [SHERBORNE in bold letters on the masthead, WEST DORSET smaller and fainter underneath] I’d think it’s not the local one and I wouldn’t buy it.”
“It’s rubbish, that paper, there’s nothing in there of any interest to anybody in Bridport, what there is has already been in the Bridport News.”
“If they managed to come up with a fantastic story about Bridport that nobody else had got, then I might buy the paper, but otherwise no, it’s boring.”
The average weekly sale of the Western Gazette’s West Dorset edition was 2,663 in 2009, according to official ABC figures. Sherborne’s tally was 2,841.
The vox pops above suggest the Gazette will struggle this year to do better in West Dorset.
The Gazette was asked last week for its own official comments, but no response has been received.
Editor’s Note: I had hoped to find more enthusiasm for the Western Gazette. In recent months it has published good stories on subjects like the South West Quadrant, planning applications in West Bay Road, Cattistock playground and Dorchester town centre. I’m interested in Sherborne news and I know there is traffic from West Dorset to Sherborne for pubs (eg The Digby Tap), shops (eg Booklore, Buzz, Fired Earth, the Pear Tree Delicatessen, the Toy Barn, etc) and grand structures like the Abbey and the two castles. But everyone I spoke to was scornful of the merged edition.
The Western Gazette is published by Northcliffe, best known as the regional arm of the company which publishes The Daily Mail. It’s possible Northcliffe sees more of a future in the west and south of Dorset for its websites www.dorchesterpeople.co.uk and www.weymouthpeople.co.uk Dorchester in particular is regarded as prime territory for rounding up Daily Mail readers.
Last year Northcliffe also considered launching a bridportpeople site. In total (I was told by a Northcliffe manager) the company has registered 3,000 domain names nationwide, covering towns with a population of more than 10,000 people.
Meanwhile, View From Publishing is experimenting with an online newspaper called the Dorset Weekender, while the Bridport News, Lyme Regis News and Dorset Echo – all owned by Newsquest – are conducting surveys to see how people interact with their websites.
One Response to ““It’s rubbish”: Western Gazette merges West Dorset edition”
(It’s been pointed out to me that various technical problems are afflicting this website at the moment – March 23 – so the comment that mine below was made in response to can’t be seen. I’m sorry about this. However, I’ve let my response stand because it seems pretty self-contained. It was addressing a point about the Gazette perhaps being affected by the weekly Wednesday battle between the Bridport News and the Lyme Regis News on one side, and the View From titles on the other).
I suppose you could interpret things that way. The battle between Newsquest and the View From must make it harder for the WG to pick up ads in Bridport. I think there’s only one from Bridport in the first chunk of the current issue (from good old Bridport Music) and just a couple from Dorchester. But Northcliffe are making all sorts of changes to their papers right across the South West. So who knows?
As far as I’m concerned, the point is in that ‘who knows’? I didn’t really want to write about the Western Gazette, but I buy it every week, and have been doing so for a very long time, and it annoys me that there’s not a word of explanation in the current issue about the merger. Not that I can see.
I truly don’t understand why a business that’s supposed to be all about communication seems to think that saying nothing is a great idea. Particularly because a local newspaper is not just a business, it’s a social institution, like a pub or a football club. It might be a pain for the people who own papers and pubs and football clubs but their status does mean people that people feel entitled to have a say about important matters – just as before on this site, with the Bridport News moving to a Wednesday.
Actually, I think that one of the reasons the Bridport News has got much much better than it was, is that it seems to have remembered that its purpose is to be an institution, like a good pub. It’s got one or two odd regulars, but if you regard its two reporters as being like a landlord and landlady, well, that’s up to them.
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