MEN Media has announced that they will cease publishing the Wilmslow Express, along with five other free weekly titles including the Stockport Times.
These will be replaced by the new Manchester Weekly News which will be distributed free to more than 265,000 homes across Greater Manchester.
It will be launched in early April and a proportion of the editorial content and display advertising will be editionised to three areas: Salford, South Manchester and Tameside.
The changes to the MEN Media portfolio will result in nine positions on weekly titles being made redundant but a similar number of new digital roles will be created.
Editor in chief Rob Irvine said: "The new Manchester Weekly News will be a great addition to our portfolio, offering an excellent service of local news and opinion and supporting and promoting the Manchester Evening News and our website.
"Roughly half of the content of the new paper will be editionised so that local communities continue to be well served. It will also give people a rounded picture of what is happening around the region."
MEN Media also publishes paid-for weekly titles in Stockport, Rochdale, Accrington, Rossendale and Macclesfield which are unaffected by these changes.
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Comments
Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below.
Not long now I suspect before the people of Wilmslow will be writing "Wilmslow, Greater Manchester" when giving their postal addresses, and paying the higher insurance premiums to go with it. The gradual integration is all being done by stealth.
There is a need for a good quality weekly, but it must be a proper newspaper, championing local issues and holding politicians to account. I can't remember the last time Wilmslow Express it had a proper lead story let alone a scoop.
Its not the journalists fault, they were just under resourced. Its not long ago WE had a local office and employed cub-journalists to follow up local stories.
Would have survived if it was a better read?
Does anyone know when WE was established?
The real headline should be that Wilmslow will be without a weekly newspaper for the first time in over 140 years!
"The Wilmslow Express is a weekly freesheet tabloid newspaper for the North East Cheshire town of Wilmslow and surrounding villages.
It was founded in 1981 as the result of the amalgamation of two earlier newspapers: the County Express and East Cheshire Observer, established in 1955, and the Wilmslow & Alderley and Knutsford Advertiser, founded in 1874 as the Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser. For the first 16 years of its existence it was the Wilmslow Express Advertiser, barring 16 months from August 1991 to December 1992 when it was the Wilmslow & Knutsford Express Advertiser (although it still only covered Wilmslow; the parallel Knutsford Express Advertiser likewise changed its title to become the Knutsford & Wilmslow Express Advertiser). It adopted its present title in 1997.
It’s published by Greater Manchester Weekly Newspapers, part of MEN Media, which was sold to Trinity Mirror by the Guardian Media Group in March 2010. As with all MEN titles, since May 2009 it’s been sharing offices with the Manchester Evening News – first in Manchester, then in Chadderton on the outskirts of Oldham from September 2010.
Although it’s primarily a freesheet, about a tenth of the print run is sold through the news trade.
It’s shared a website with the Macclesfield Express ever since MEN Media reorganised their newspapers’ online presences in January 2013.
It comes out on Thursdays."
Source: http://bit.ly/1CoTqTU
By co-incidence I contacted them a couple of weeks ago to see what the current position was regarding delivery; their reply made no mention of the impending demise:
"Thank you for your email regarding delivery of the Wilmslow Express.
Free newspapers are funded from the advertising within them. Due to this we are limited to the number of copies we can produce, based on the revenue gained. For this reason we have never been able to deliver to all addresses in any area and have only ever delivered to a percentage of properties.
In recent years advertising revenues have been in decline, mainly due to the recession and people finding alternative ways to advertise (mostly online). This has left us with less budget to produce free papers, leading to us having to further cut back on the number of copies we deliver and is the reason we no longer delivery in your area.
We are sorry that we cannot give a more positive answer to your query.
Kind regards, Trinity Mirror Distributors Ltd"
I wonder if those of you in "less affluent areas" ;-) will receive free delivery of the new Manchester rag?
Julie Green is right - Wilmslow will become an extension of Manchester and the loss of the Advertiser is the loss of a piece of its identity.
Those officials that don't engage with the e-world methods of communication ( excluding Michael Jones's ornithological based 'to tweet or not to tweet' issue )... have lost a valuable route to express an opinion....... but then again with some of their non representative views, that may be no bad thing...!
Vic's wit will be missed, alongside David Pike's ramblings from the Memorial Ground.
Maybe the latter two could both have a time slot in the council meetings... they are both local characters that promote Wilmslow.... ??
Ultimately I, like I suspect a lot of people, read the paper but it really backed up the news I had already got from here- which is interactive, daily and accessible anywhere. The saddest thing for me about the paper going is that to some older people it is the only way they know what is going on in Wilmslow and the surrounding area. No matter how good it is, my parents would no more think about getting their news on line than flying to the moon.
Many people, probably particularly the "older" generation rely on the friendly drop through the letter box, allowing those unable or unwilling to go out, to keep a breast of local news and events.
All those willing deliverers, working in all weather and getting just reward for their work. Again, such a shame.
Come on Wilmslow man/woman, step up to the plate, please!
As for a replacement for our local paper- you are reading it now; the question is how do we make more people aware of it and thereby contribute?
I think Lisa is doing a fantastic job with the Wilmslow and Alderley websites, well done keep it up!
Eighteen householders have been denied delivery of the Wilmslow Advertiser for the past two years with patchy delivery for a long time previously, despite the fact that the distributor was obliged to pass along the road in order to deliver papers to at least 50 households further up the road.
On behalf of my neighbours I had tried on three or four occasions to have our small round included but was told that it was not viable and instead of increasing distribution MEN was in the process of trying to make as many cuts as possible
It is really sad to see the paper disappear altogether but there was neither rhyme nor reason in the way MEN ran their distribution: it beggars belief that they would prefer to walk past 18 potential advertisers/respondents at the start as well as on completion of their delivery
As the mother of two youngsters whose first jobs were delivering The Wilmslow Advertiser to a much larger local area before they were re-alocated, I cannot believe that they have run the whole paper into the ground
Long live Wilmslow.co.uk!