… but our hugely popular Journal website and social media channels will continue to provide local news coverage!
By Stephen Horton, Journal editor.
I’m saddened to inform readers that this issue of the Stoke Gifford Journal magazine will be the last you will receive through your letterbox.
I hope you have enjoyed reading our in-depth coverage of local news since the first issue of our magazine was published back in October 2018.
Printing a free newspaper and distributing it to thousands of homes has always been a financially challenging exercise, but thanks to the tremendous support of our advertisers, we have managed to keep our heads above water and continue publishing high-quality products for over nine years (starting with our sister publication, the Bradley Stoke Journal magazine, in May 2013).
However, cost pressures resulting from Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with declining demand within the wider print advertising market, have brought matters to a head in the last couple of years.
Most recently, the energy crisis has led to printing prices rocketing, and the notification of a further increase (the third in 10 months) from 1st April has unfortunately been the final straw.
Another factor in the decision to cease publication has been your editor’s desire to start taking things easier as he approaches normal retirement age!
Whereas it might have been possible to struggle on for a few more years by lowering the quality threshold and throwing a magazine together from poor quality and irrelevant press releases, that is not a path we wanted to go down.
Online presence continues
But the good news is that we will be continuing our extensive local news coverage on all our existing online channels: website, Facebook and Twitter.
Please do take a moment to explore our recently revamped, fully responsive website (stokegiffordournal.co.uk), which is full of news articles and information pages.
To keep fully informed of everything that is going on in the area, we recommend following our Twitter feed (@TheSGJournal), which includes breaking news, brief items that don’t justify a website article and links to relevant news from other publishers. You don’t need to have a Twitter account to read it.
You can also view the latest tweets on the homepage of our website.
To make sure you don’t miss any local news stories, why not sign up to our email newsletter? To subscribe, click on the email icon at the top of our website. You will receive no more than one email message per day.
Thanks for reading our magazine. See you online soon!
This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of the Stoke Gifford Journal magazine (on page 29).
