Kent Messenger
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The Kent Messenger is a local weekly newspaper for the county of Kent in England.
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The Kent Messenger grew from the Maidstone Telegraph founded in the county town of Kent in 1859, and passed from subsequent owners, the Masters brothers in the 1880s when it was acquired by Barham Pratt Boorman, and it has remained in the Boorman family ever since. It then became the Kent Messenger.
[edit] Overview
Barham was succeeded by his son, Henry Pratt Boorman in the late 1920s. Known as The Guv'nor, he was an enthusiast for photography, and pioneered extensive use of picures in his paper. He realised that people would be keen to buy the paper if it included their picures or pictures of their own towns and villages. Henry's son Edwin joined the firm in the late 1960s and succeeded his father as Chairman, stepping into the role of President of the Kent Messenger Group at the end of 2005, when he was succeeded as Chairman by his oldest daughter, Geraldine Allinson. The firm moved from its original editorial offices and printing plant close to Maidstone East Station in the early 1970s following a fire. The new location is about five miles west of Maidstone, at Messenger House, in New Hythe Lane, Larkfield. During Edwin's Chairmanship the company expanded, acquiring other titles, as well as diversifying into local radio and developing a web presence at www.kentonline.co.uk giving access to editorial content and advertising for the whole county.
The Kent Messenger currently appears in six editions: County, Maidstone (Town), Weald, Malling and District, Sittingbourne and Medway Messenger, all of which are published weekly on a Friday. Other paid-for titles from the group are published on Thursdays: Swanley Messenger, Dartford Messenger, Gravesend Messenger, Faversham News, Kentish Gazette (Canterbury), Whitstable Gazette, Herne Bay Gazette, East Kent Mercury (Deal), Dover Mercury, Folkestone Express, and the Kentish Express, with three editions (Ashford and District, Hythe and Romney Marsh, and Tenterden).
Between 1968 and 2003 the group published a daily evening paper which began as the Evening Post and later became two editions, Medway Today and Kent Today. The Kent Messenger Group also circulates local editions of its free paper KM Extra in various parts of the county, including Thanet where it has no paid-for title, and in 2004 it launched the Bexley Extra and Bromley Extra reaching into two London boroughs which were historically parts of Kent. This pushed the weekly readership of KM titles over one million.
From the mid-1990s the company developed an interest in local radio. The first three stations were TLR (Thanet Local Radio) based in Margate, Neptune Radio based in Dover, and CTFM broadcasting from Canterbury. In 2003 the company acquired two stations from Mercury in West Kent, broadcasting from Tonbridge, and Medway broadcasting from Rochester. All five stations were re-branded as KMfm. After several years of backing RSL projects in Ashford and broadcasting as Lark FM the company won the franchise for a full-time licence and KMfm for Ashford opened in 2005. In 2006, CTR (County Town Radio, broadcasting in Maidstone) which had been set up by former KMfm presenters, was brought into the group, being rebranded a year later.
