Family-owned Tindle Newspapers, a UK pioneer of hyperlocal publishing, has been sold to another family partnership, four years after its founder died aged 95.
The story goes that Ray Tindle bought his first newspaper, the Tooting & Balham Gazette, with his £250 (A$481) demob payment, and went on buying them until he had more than 220 titles, famously remaining debt-free.
Now another publishing family – or more specifically, a member of one, Edward Iliffe, whose Iliffe Media Group is in a joint venture with another publishing family, the Fowlers, to buy Tindle Newspapers, now run by his son Owen.
The Iliffes also have deep roots in newspaper publishing dating to 1891, although it picked up the Kentish Gazette – mentioned as one of the UK’s oldest titles – with its 2017 acquisition of the Kent Messenger Group, including, quite incidentally, my own Sheerness Times-Guardian and Faversham News, two of the nine paid-sale papers included in the deal..
There’s common ground here, some of which I didn’t learn about until came to be chasing the remaining Cossar presses in the world for GXpress. Last we heard, there were only five of the web-fed Wharfedale-derived flatbed letterpresses anywhere, two in New Zealand and (you guessed it) one at one at a Tindle outpost in the West Somerset village of Williton. Apparently the latter came from Canterbury in Kent, where former Sydney managing director of Mediaspectrum, David Page recalls stacking papers from its fly in younger days at the Kentish Gazette. Pieces of history we hope they’ll continue to cherish.
The deal to acquire Tindle Media went through this week and while there are no reports of plans for it so far, indications are good. The Iliffes have news ink in their blood, dating at least to William Isaac Iliffe’s launch of the Coventry Telegraph, and Edward Iliffe’s later 1920s co-ownership of the London Daily Telegraph.
The Fowlers have also been in regional publishing for decades, with the two families currently running Highland News & Media – formerly Scottish Provincial Press – as a joint venture. Of the acquisition, Owen Tindle speaks of “the best strategy for our much-loved local brands” and the benefits of greater combined resources.
There’s pride here, and a commitment to private, family ownership and community-focused journalism, and at what is undoubtedly a difficult time for publishers, we wish them well.
Peter Coleman
Pictured: Sir Ray Tindle, who died in April 2022