Somerset Guardian

It’s published by Bath News & Media Ltd, part of Northcliffe Media, which itself was the regional publishing arm of the Daily Mail & General Trust until November 2012 but has since become part of the Local World group. Together with the Frome Standard it’s part of a Standard & Guardian series whose editorial offices are in Bath, although there’s a branch office in Midsomer Norton (the address of which is given below).

It was founded in 1893 as the Somerset Guardian and Radstock Observer. In 1962 it merged with what was then the Somerset Standard as the Somerset Guardian, Somerset Standard (still covering much the same circulation area; the Frome edition was the Somerset Standard, Somerset Guardian. It adopted its present title in 1981, was renamed the Somerset and Avon Guardian in 1984 but reversed the change again in 1996.

It used to have its own sub-site on Northcliffe’s thisissomerset.co.uk website, but in 2011 Northcliffe increased the profile of their websites as general local portals at the expense of the newspapers’ online presence, although most of the news still came from the newspapers as “trusted sources”. It gained its own website in 2013 as a result of Local World’s decision to give all former Northcliffe newspapers their own “publisher-branded” sites.

It comes out on Thursdays.