Independent free weekly Your Leek Paper has doubled its staff six months after launching.
The title was founded in the Staffordshire market town by seven former employees of established weekly the Leek Post and Times, which was taken over by Northcliffe Newspapers earlier this year. Among those behind the launch are former Post and Times editor Gary Shenton, who used his redundancy cheque to help fund the project.
He said Your Leek Paper now had a full- and part-time staff of 17 and was turning a profit. It is claiming sales of around 4,200 copies a week against the Leek Post & Times’s audited circulation of 12,000.
Shenton said: “We’ve just put out our biggest paper, which was 56 pages, and we are selling more than 4,000 copies. We’ve established ourselves and we are going to go on and on. Now we have doubled our staff, we are not just a newspaper – we are a major employer in the town.”
By Dominic Ponsford
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