Isle of Thanet Gazette

It was founded in 1870 by Thomas Harman Keble and was originally known as Keble’s Gazette. When it was taken over by William John Parrett Ltd of Sittingbourne in 1909, it became the Margate, Ramsgate and Isle of Thanet Gazette and East Kent Advertiser, and took on its present title in 1924.

It’s published by Kent Regional News & Media, which became a branch of the Daily Mail & General Trust‘s regional newspaper publishing division, Northcliffe Media, when they acquired it from Trinity Mirror in 2007. At the end of 2012 Northcliffe became part of the new Local World media group.

For most of its existence the editorial offices have been in Margate, although they moved in January 2009 from Union Row, where the Gazette had been based since 1899, to Mill Lane. However, they recently moved to Broadstairs.

In 1918 the Gazette absorbed a local rival, the Thanet Times, which was resurrected in 1958 as a midweek paid-for companion and then repositioned as a freesheet in 2009, only to be closed down again in October 2012.

Under DMGT the Gazette‘s web presence was through KRN Media’s thisiskent.co.uk website – although in a somewhat downgraded form following Northcliffe’s more general repositioning of its websites as local portals during 2011. However, Local World took the decision that all its newspapers should have their own “publisher-branded” websites by the summer of 2013.

It comes out on Fridays.