Press Release for Wednesday Action

A list of the titles would be useful.

The name is familiar. Does he own the Surrey Advertiser? The Surrey Advertiser group in turn owns the Farnborough News.

We have serious problem exposing anything locally, especially Frarnborough Airport.

Here is a little bit of info on Tindle...

"Regional press news - this story published 18.4.2003
Record profits for regional newspaper firm
By Holdthefrontpage Staff
Tindle Newspapers has announced record profits for the year ending on March 31 - breaking the £5m barrier for the first time. The regional newspaper operator, based in Surrey, has titles all over the country and recently launched several new papers, bringing the total to 128.
The £5.3m profit figure does not include profit from the company's seven radio stations, which are now under a separate operating company.
Company chairman Sir Ray Tindle told executives that in view of the uncertainties in the economy and the newspaper industry over the last 12 months, the increase was "extraordinarily good", and that some papers had excelled themselves in what had not been an easy year.
Circulation had also risen, with the overall figure reaching 585,997, another company record.
Sir Ray felt the outlook was rosy for the regional press, and forecast another good year for the company.
He said: "I've been in weeklies for 55 years and for most of that time weekly newspapers did not rank very high in the media of the country.
"Now, almost 1,200 papers within the total of 1,300 in the UK are weeklies, having a joint rising circulation of 31,000,000. Today we are more highly regarded than ever before."

Among individual newspaper series, the Axminster-based Devon, Dorset and Somerset series had gone from strength to strength with ad revenue growth of 43 per cent and strong circulation increases.
The Forest of Dean Review had seen overall revenue growth of nine per cent, and was continuing to build its market share. And the Farnham Herald Series had seen an 8.1 per cent increase in total revenue.
Tindle Newspapers was started with the £300 given to Sir Ray when he left the Army in 1947. He has built much of his success from buying small, failing local titles and turning them to profit. He began in 1950 when a printers' strike led him to try different aspects of newspaper production - and decided he wanted to run some of his own. "
from www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk


Top earning UK broadcasters...
The oldest multimillionaire is the 74-year-old local newspaper and radio mogul, Sir Ray Tindle,...
The top 10 (2000 earnings in brackets)
1 £185m (£175m) Sir Peter Michael - GWR
2 £173m Sir Ray Tindle - Tindle Newspapers
3 £130m (150m) Anne Wood - Ragdoll Productions
4 £120m (£100m) Mike Luckwell - Hit Entertainment
5 £108m (£36m) Paul Smith - Complete Communications
6 £105m (£140m) Chris Wright - Chrysalis
7 £90m (£140m) Michael Green - Carlton Communications
8 £70m (£40m) Noel Edmonds - Unique and UBC Media
=9 £60m (£40m) Rowan Atkinson - Hindmeck and Tiger Aspect
=9 £60m (£50m) Avtar Lit - Sunrise Radio
from the Guardian


"Sir Ray Tindle purchased the weekly industry news leader The RADIO Magazine from Goldcrest Broadcasting Ltd owned by Howard & Patricia Rose. Sir Ray said he was delighted with the purchase. "I first became involved with local radio 30 years ago with Robert Stiby in Capital. I now have seven stations," he said. "The RADIO Magazine will sit comfortably with these but I am particularly glad that Howard and his colleagues are staying on. I couldn't do without them."

As well as owning over a hundred local newspapers, Tindle also owns the following commercial radio stations: 103.4 The Beach, 106.3 Bridge FM, Channel 103 FM, Dream 100, Dream 107.7, Island FM and Midlands Radio 3. "

from Radio Magazine

".. could have been forgiven for thinking he was indestructible. After nearly 50 years in the business, his newspaper empire had survived every post-war slump and change the economy could throw at it.
Then late in 1995, when he was aged 69, he was forced to face up to his own mortality. He was diagnosed with potentially fatal cancer of the larynx, or voicebox."

taken from the Surrey Advertiser (which he used to own)

""I was brought up by a newspaper man," he said. "My family was not in the industry but we were scattered during the war and I found myself living for a period with a newspaper man from the Torquay Herald and I spent all my spare time with him in his office, watching the presses and trying, as a schoolboy, to write a piece good enough to get published."

He was already incurably bitten by the newspaper bug by the time he volunteered for the RAF. Transferred to the Devonshire Regiment, he single-handedly produced a newspaper for the troopship carrying him out East, and when the war was over, there was only one career beckoning: journalism.

Except it was not journalism that claimed him for its own, but newspaper management. "I wrote to every editor on every national newspaper and not one of them replied," he said.

"Then I wrote to two local papers and one of them replied, and I got a job as a general dogsbody on the Croydon Times.

His affection for his first paper and his distress when later it died, was the catalyst for his mission to rescue failing weeklies. "I was very sad," he said. "You always feel sentimental about your first paper and when mine died I asked myself why and I studied it.

"A great mistake was made in the 1940s and 1950s in weekly newspapers. They were trying to emulate the nationals. Local papers have got to be strictly local and far too many weekly papers were trying to become bigger and cover larger areas and in their philosophy and their staffing they tried to copy the nationals."

Convinced this was utterly wrong, Sir Ray set about bucking the trend and rescuing failures. His formula for small weeklies has proved so successful that he proudly oversees an empire of more than 80 titles. Not a single one has been lost.

The rescued Tenby Observer is the jewel in his crown. The liquidators had been called in and the staff were packing away the typewriters by the time Sir Ray struck a deal. He made it concentrate exclusively on Tenby news and its circulation has doubled while losses have been turned into profits.

He knows everything there is to know about the world of local weeklies, and insists he has never been tempted to become involved in the alien culture of the nationals.

Forays into local broadcasting and free papers were inspired by the need to control intrusive new media that threatened his beloved weekly newspapers, and having ensured his titles are safe, he can dismiss the competition.

"What do you know that is like a weekly newspaper?" he challenges. "They all said in the 1950s that the day of the weekly newspaper was over, that the local dailies were driving them out, then local radio came and they said that would drive the rest of them out, then commercial television and then the freesheets.

"But we have lived for 50 years through that. The pundits know nothing about it, but I take each threat seriously until I win. You would not have wanted me to do anything else, and it has all ended in our favour because in the end there is nothing like a local weekly."