Johnston Press

History

The Johnston family has been involved in the printing business since 1767. The brothers William and Arthur Keith Johnston founded W. & A. K. Johnston Limited in 1826. It bought control of its first newspaper, the Falkirk Herald, in 1846. The company would remain headquartered in Falkirk for the next 150 years. The family publishing company was renamed F Johnston & Co Ltd in 1882, a title it would retain until it was floated on the London Stock Exchange as Johnston Press in 1988. The company's first major acquisition came in 1970, when it took control of the Fife-based publishers Strachan & Livingston. In 1978 it bought Wilfred Edmunds Ltd in Chesterfield, publisher of the Derbyshire Times and The Yorkshire Weekly Newspaper Group in Wakefield.

The Company bought The West Sussex County Times in 1988, The Halifax Evening Courier in 1994 and the newspaper interests of EMAP plc in 1996. Further expansion followed with Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers in 1999 and Regional Independent Media Holdings in 2002.

The Company expanded into the Irish market in 2005 by purchasing Local Press Ltd, a company owned by 3i (£65 million), the newspaper assets of Scottish Radio Holdings, known as Score Press with forty-five titles in Scotland and Ireland (£155 million), and the Leinster Leader Group (€138.6 million).

The Company acquired The Scotsman Publications in 2006.

On 7 July 2011, NUJ-represented staff at three Johnston Press titles voted more than 90% in favour of taking strike action. The titles involved were the Doncaster Free Press, the South Yorkshire Times, the Goole Courier and the Selby Times. The dispute stemmed from Johnston Press' announcement in June 2011 of plans to cut 18 jobs including two editors. Following the ballot and the failure to reach a settlement with Johnston Press staff walked out on indefinite strike on 15 July 2011. Despite the strike continuing for several weeks, Johnston Press' Chief Executive John Fry refused the NUJ's request for mediation through Acas. Johnston Press went on to service notice of redundancy upon the South Yorkshire Times editor Jim Oldfield on 8 August 2011. Graeme Huston, of the Doncaster Free Press took over management of the paper, becoming its editor-in-chief. The strike continued until 6 September.

Iconic Newspapers acquired Johnston Press' titles in the Republic of Ireland in 2014.

In March 2014 Johnston Press joined forces with other media companies including Local World and Newsquest, to create a nationwide digital advertising proposition called 1XL, which now boasts over 23 million monthly unique users and a billion monthly ad views.

In February 2016 the company announced it was buying i newspaper for £24m. The deal to buy i was completed on 10 April 2016, giving Johnston Press a daily print circulation of over 600,000 newspapers and an audience online and in print of almost 32m people.

In July 2016 it was announced that Tindle Newspapers planned to acquire JP's three Isle of Man titles in a deal worth £4.25m.

In January 2017 the company announced that it had concluded a deal to sell 13 of its East Midlands and East Anglia titles (including the Stamford Mercury) to Iliffe Media for £17m. The same month it announced it had secured a multi-million pound print contract to print Monday to Saturday issues of the Daily Mail newspaper at its Portsmouth Web facility in Hampshire. This follows the announcement by ANL of the closure of their print site at Didcot.

British newspapers

The following is a partial list of British newspapers owned by the company:

Irish newspapers

In total, 22 titles are published in Northern Ireland:

Online

The company owns the following websites, in addition to newspaper sites as above, and regionalised versions of these: