The Bath Chronicle has become the latest evening newspaper to move to overnight production.

Editor Sam Holliday said the decision had been made following the success of other papers such as fellow Northcliffe title the South Wales Evening Post, which he said had shown “remarkable” circulation growth since going to overnight production.

The Chronicle is one of the smallest daily titles in the country, and Sam said the move was an obvious one to take, as it had already had an early morning deadline.

He said: “I have been following the debate about overnight production very carefully.

“For us, it was a rather more simple decision than for many other titles as our previous deadline was at 8.20am and it was very rare that we changed anything in the early hours of the morning to what we’d agreed the night before.”

The Chronicle is now going to press at around 5am, and the new arrangement was given a low-key launch to make sure all the copies were able to consistently reach outlining areas early in the morning.

Sam said: “The perfect situation is to go to press at about midnight or 2am to ensure you have all the material you want in the paper and can guarantee having the papers coming through the letterboxes with the morning national titles.

“However, this wasn’t possible for us because all the best time slots are already being taken on presses around the country which already have huge commitments to nationals, morning titles and weeklies.”

Once the new print time has bedded in, the paper plans to launch a ‘Wake up to the Chronicle’ campaign, which Sam says would mirror the fact that not only are the papers available earlier – but the paper itself was undergoing a lot of changes.

He said: “Since I’ve been editor at the Chronicle, we have undergone a huge amount of changes and I am so proud of the staff here who have adapted so well to whatever’s been thrown at them.

“They are a very talented bunch and they have accepted this new change of working methods with the high level of enthusiasm and professionalism that I have come to expect.”

Among the changes the Chronicle is currently going through is a relaunch of it weekly leisure supplement, and establishing closer ties with its own website.

Sam added: “Our recent research showed that despite the Bath area having a higher amount of people with Internet access than most other parts of the country, not nearly enough of these are going onto our website.

“If you take the web seriously – as we do – then going to overnight production can actually be seen as a way of making your website more relevant by allowing it to break news during the day to attract more hits while still keeping the newspaper at the heart of your operation.

“As part of the marketing for this overnight campaign, our news editor Paul Wiltshire came up with the concept of ‘Breakfast with the Chronicle’ and ‘Break Fast with www.thisisbath.co.uk’. I really like that and it shows the relationship I think print and online should have – they should be mutually supportive and yet still both have a distinctive voice.”