Originally called the Kington Chronicle, the magazine started life some 10 or so years ago with funding from Herefordshire Council. It was a town newsletter run by volunteers and delivered to every house in Kington. After a few years, funding was no longer available and it ceased to be. In 2016 one of the Kington town councillors, Fred Hawkins, decided that it should be revived and started producing a four-page newsletter covering council news, put together by volunteer Ken Jones. I moved to Kington in November 2016 and saw the newsletter, which contained a plea for editorial help. I was foolish enough to answer the call and met up with Fred for a chat. The upshot was, I became the editor and expanded the newsletter to 12, then 24 and then 28 pages. I developed the Chronicle into a magazine, covering town news, events, council information and so on; at this point it was funded by Kington Town Council and around 500 copies were printed at the council offices on the printer. These were distributed in cafes, shops and the library.

I took over the creation of the magazine, learning to use MS Publisher and Photoshop. Around this time, I attended a meeting of councillors from Kington, Knighton and Presteigne who were interested in discussing the possibility of a “Tri-town” initiative, to consider sharing back-office and resources. This gave me the encouragement to expand the coverage of the magazine to include the three towns. I began to seek advertising to fund a bigger print-run and changed the name to MidBorder News, redesigning the magazine to look more like a ‘proper’ publication rather than a newsletter. 

At that time the printing was done by Saxoprint, based in the Netherlands, and a print run of 1000 magazines cost around £200. Post-Brexit however, this became very problematic and delivery was erratic with the boxes being held up in Customs; I never knew when they would be delivered and this made distribution difficult. UK-based printers were significantly more expensive and I had to get several quotes before finding one we could work with: Signworx have done us proud.

Advertising revenue has risen and now covers the cost of printing; it also covers the annual cost of the online platform, Issuu. The magazine is distributed to the three towns and also a good number of village halls and pubs in the surrounding areas. Via Facebook and Instagram we also cover events in Leominster, Hay on Wye, Llandrindod Wells, Leintwardine and Newtown and are networked to lots of local community pages giving significant exposure along the mid-border area.

Emphasis is on supporting local businesses and publicising events, fundraisers, concerts, talks, coffee mornings, exhibitions and whatever else is going on, with the objective of helping small local venues to survive and even thrive by encouraging people to go to events beyond their immediate locality. This has been very successful and whenever we put a call-out on Facebook for peoples’ news there is a good response. We have regular advertisers to whom we are very grateful for their support: we couldn’t manage without them. MidBorder News has become a reliable source of local information and we always get very positive feedback from our readers. Thank you all!

Annie Vickerstaff, ex-editor