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Weekly gears up for first issue with launch party

A new weekly freesheet has held a launch party ahead of its inaugural edition being published next month.

More than 100 people attended the party hosted by The Times of Tunbridge Wells, which will hit newsstands for the first time next month.

The Times will have an initial print run of 30,000, which will be available at various locations within a 10-mile radius of Tunbridge Wells town centre, while teams of hawkers will also hand out copies.

The launch event, which was attended by the Mayor of Tunbridge Wells and local businesspeople, featured a display of historic Tunbridge Wells newspapers, on loan from the local museum.

Richard Moore

Guests could also pose for a photo to take away as a memento of the event, with their image framed in a mocked-up front page of the paper.

Richard Moore, editorial director of Times publisher One Media, pictured above at the event, has previously stated his aim to “buck the trend” of newspaper closures with the intention of providing “serious local content reflecting the business and culture of the town”.

The 64-page Times will go to print on Tuesday nights and will be available from 6am the following morning.

Its first issue will be available from Wednesday 4 March.

2 comments

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  • February 16, 2015 at 9:15 am
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    How confident are they if they are offering it free? The measure of how good the public think any paper is, is putting their hands in their pocket and paying for it. Still, it looks loads better than some of the JP freebies, which are so poor they make your squirm..

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  • February 17, 2015 at 1:30 pm
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    We launched a free paper two years ago – it’s going great guns thank-you very much and we are upping the print run soon to more than 23,000. The public won’t put their hands in their pockets for news – why should they? It’s free everywhere online – so a free paper has a good home and the advertisers love it. Print is not dead by a long chalk, it just needs re-thinking a bit. News is no longer broken in print – but you can’t swat a fly with an iPad (unless you’re very rich) and parts of the country still don’t offer a phone signal, let alone 3 or 4G. A good, free newspaper has a market. Oh yes it does.

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