An independent publisher who owns a weekly newspaper has taken over a monthly golfing magazine which he helped to launch in 2008.

Danny Lockwood, who publishes The Press in Dewsbury, has bought out Yorkshire Golfer magazine from one of his former business partners Mark Flanagan.

The title was launched in the summer of 2008 and focuses on golfing news from an area which has around 220 clubs and more than 100,000 regular golfers.

Yorkshire Golfer is distributed free to clubs and Danny said many of his journalists already had experience of writing golf stories.

He said: “I’ve always contributed to Yorkshire Golfer and penned my regular ‘Swinging Wild’ column, so when Mark felt he needed to pursue other opportunities there was no way I was going to let the magazine fade away.

“Local weeklies will carry a few club results and regional dailies used to at least try to give serious amateur golf a nodding acknowledgment, but they’re in the ‘mashie niblick’ category now – neither use nor ornament.

“My business is well set up to adapt. When I left RIM – now Johnston Press – in 2001, I did quite a bit of consultancy work with a golf magazine and over half my current staff are either from that connection, or from when I was editor-in-chief at the Dewsbury Reporter.”

Danny also publishes a rugby league magazine which focuses on the north of England, called League Weekly.

Mark, who is a former sports editor of the Hull Daily Mail, is now understood to be concentrating on a golf venture in the north of England, involving event management and print and online media.

Added Danny: “I read the print-media doom and gloom merchants on a daily basis, but for the people I talk to in the pub, out and about on the streets of Dewsbury and Batley, or even golfing up and down the country and across Europe, nothing beats the ‘feel’ of picking up a newspaper or magazine and reading yours, or a friend or family member’s name in print.

“It’s tangible, it’s scrapbook stuff, it isn’t an ephemeral web browser page – it’s proof that you were real, that you existed, and that some other human being took the time to write about you and someone else committed their words to paper.

“The magic I felt in my first byline in 1978 is still the thrill that ordinary people feel when journalists write about them. That’s why there’s still a very real future in publishing.”