Maria Lloyd (00:01.422)
Hello Phil and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast which shines a light on the success stories, key learnings and insights from people and businesses based in Reading, Berkshire. I'm your host, Maria Lloyd. I've lived in Reading for 20 years and I've only recently started to appreciate what our wonderful town has to offer. Join me as I explore Reading's opportunities and lessons in more detail. Now, without further ado, let's jump in. Hello Phil and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. Thank you for coming on. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you, Maria.

Thank you for welcoming me to your home as well so we can discuss Caversham Bridge today. Well, welcome and see what you want to find out about the Caversham Bridge. Well, first of all, let's have a bit of an introduction to yourself and what the Caversham Bridge is. Okay. Well, I'm Phil Chatfield. I retired about six years ago after many years working in environmental regulation and I'm now involved in running a local community newspaper here in Caversham and Emma Green. Brilliant.

How long have you lived in Caversham, Reading for? What do you like about it? We moved here in 1986 and we love being able to get in and out of the village very easily with all the facilities we have in Caversham and of course we're very close to the centre of Reading here. For my work I needed to be at the station regularly so again very short trip to the station. It was ideal. One of the things I do love about Reading and it's true of Caversham as well is the

the amazing diversity of peoples and cultures that we have in our town. It really is, I think, quite an exceptional mix here in Reading. That's quite a popular one. Whenever I speak to people, think the diversity of Reading, Calvisham, really comes through. you're right, it does add a lot of different aspects to where we live, gives us different things to think about. So, yeah, brilliant. Now, obviously, we're here to discuss the Calvisham Bridge, the local paper. One of the things that surprised me when I first started is

How many people are actually involved in getting this one local newspaper up and running every month? So could you expand on that? How many people are involved and what the different roles are in order to publish this newspaper? So the paper has been running for about 60, just over 60 years and it was set up by the churches together in Caversham at that time with an editorial team of about 10 people representing each of the churches in Caversham.

Maria Lloyd (02:27.758)
But behind them there was a whole team of people delivering the paper and doing the design, running the accounts and so on. There's around about 120 people involved in the paper every month right now. That includes around about 80 to 85 people who are involved in delivering the paper to the household, to our subscribers across the area.

as well as another sort of 30 or 40 people who contribute in way of writing, editing, proofreading, again, looking after our accounts and the company business and so on. That's amazing. There were so many different people involved. Now, how did you get involved with the Cavisham Bridge? Well, we've always had the Cavisham Bridge delivered, although I must say we didn't always enjoy it particularly because it was rather dry, but it was seen as being something

that if you lived in Caversham it was something you did. But when I retired, one of our friends who was on the board of the Caversham Bridge, they were looking for a replacement for the chair and she thought I would be a good fit. I'd been used to chairing meetings a lot in my career, so that was something that was fairly straightforward for me. And they said they needed somebody who would chair three meetings a year.

So I'd been retired for about a year and I was looking around for something that I might be able to do to, if you like, give something back to the community. So I said, I'll go and talk to the existing chair and see what he says. And he sold it to me. And I took on the role of chair and I was appointed at the end of 2019. And since as a chair, you need to know what's going on in the organization you're the chair of.

I started to meet up with the key people involved in editing and producing the paper. And it soon became apparent to me that the paper had changed very little in the way it was produced and in its content for the best part of 50 plus years. And really, with the demise of printed papers, the Caversham Bridge probably

Maria Lloyd (04:51.114)
needed to change quite radically. And so we started in early 2020 when I had my first board meeting to look at how we could make the paper more relevant to a wider section of our community. You've said there that it's changed a lot in the last five years. How has it changed overall since it started 60 years ago, you think? So obviously to meet the needs of the community.

If you look at the original papers from the 1960s and you can do that because we've had them scanned and they're now online on our website. So you can go back and compare what the paper looked like in 1964 and what it looks like now. You will see there's a difference in presentation and content and style. The content in those days was very much based around an extended parish magazine.

what was going on in the churches and around the churches. The style was very typical of newspapers of the times with very narrow columns and very dense print, very taxing on the eyes. It was quite difficult to read. And it was put together by an editorial team with representatives from each of the churches. So it was no surprise really that it was heavily orientated towards what was going on in the churches. And that remained the same for much of the remaining sort of

the following 60 years. And how have you changed over the last five years since you came in? As you said, there were things that you wanted to change, so how did you change it? Well, one of the things we did was we looked at the distribution of ages for our readership. So we did a survey fairly early on to ask people what they thought about the paper, what they liked about it, what they didn't like about it, and also tried to find out a little bit more about who our subscribers, our readers were. And it was very apparent that we had

virtually nobody under the age of 60 who was subscribing to the paper. And if you looked at the age profile, it was heavily skewed towards the 70 and 80 and 90 year olds. So we needed to modernize the paper to make it more attractive for a younger readership. And that involved making it more colorful with a wider content and more representative of our community as a whole.

Maria Lloyd (07:12.726)
What role do you think a local newspaper has in the local community? Our aim is to try and bring our community together. And it's very simple. We talk about building our community and that's what we are trying to do. And that involves bringing together people from our diverse cultural sources within Caversham, different age groups and so on. So we're trying to make

people feel that Caversham and Demogrene are their homes. That's where they want to be and that they feel part of that. I like the fact that you have specifically said how the Caversham Bridge did skew towards the older generations, but you're trying to encourage the younger ones because I think when I've spoken to local community groups, that's something I found quite a lot. The memberships for all these groups tend to be the older people rather than the younger ones. So I really like that you're targeting that and trying to...

get involved and one of the ways I you're doing that is by schools, isn't it? You speak into schools and trying to get involved with them. We've been trying to gather more information about the schools in our community. They have a very important part to play. We've got about a dozen primary schools and a very large secondary school and a very large majority of the people in Caversham either have children or grandchildren at those schools and

Those schools form a very large part of your life if you're a parent or a grandparent with all the things that are going on, whether it's sports or cultural or music or whatever. So we are trying really hard to make sure that we get better coverage from the schools. Although I have to say that it's very difficult because the schools, the headteachers and so on are all very focused on trying to get the school running and doing the education for the children.

rather than looking outwards and trying to communicate beyond the school community. But having said that, we've got a couple of examples in the most recent paper of things that been going on in local schools here. So we're hoping that we can build on that. think that's a great start. You're definitely heading in the right direction. What I like about the Caversham Bridge as well is it's written by Caversham people for Caversham people. So there are lots of articles in there that are written by, say, Alex from Four Bears and lots of other local residents in there. So

Maria Lloyd (09:34.86)
Can anyone write for the Caversham Bridge? Yes, we have articles submitted by a wide range of people, mostly from within Caversham. Occasionally they're people who have links with Caversham. So sometimes they might be somebody who used to live here, who's writing their recollections. Recently we've had a couple of articles from somebody who lived here during the Second World War and was recalling his.

recollections of what it was like growing up in Chiltern Road during the Second World War. although he doesn't live in Caversham anymore, it's very much focused on a story about Caversham for Caversham people. And I keep saying Caversham, but it's Caversham and Emmergreen and Maple Durham, and it is that area. We're not just in inverted commas, Caversham, but we are the whole of that area. And we have writers who come from right the way across the spectrum, old and young. We have people who write about gardening. We have people

write about schools or about sporting activities and sometimes they'll just do one article and that's it. And in other cases we've got people who write every month. Somebody like Happy Wanderer, who's one of our regular contributors, has been writing since around about 2010 I think. Every month he sends in something that's based on natural history or local history and that's one of the things that people look forward to reading every month.

It's a lovely selection of articles. Now, what challenges do you face in running a local newspaper? Well, there's a number of things that are, if you like, constantly being balanced. And it's important to recognize that the paper is very reliant on local advertising. So our advertising covers much of the cost of production of the paper. So trying to maintain a relationship with advertisers and to make sure that they're getting good value out of their

contributions to the paper is important. And then trying to make sure that we've got contributions coming in on a regular basis in order to fit into the time scales of producing the paper is another challenge. And sometimes, and increasingly in the last year or two, actually working out what not to include in the paper is becoming something of a challenge because we have gone from five years ago it was a 12 page newspaper, then it became

Maria Lloyd (11:57.614)
a 16 page newspaper regularly and now we are producing 20 pages every other month more or less. So we've got a lot more content coming in but trying to manage that in the space that we have is a real challenge. And we rely heavily on our editors. We've got some really experienced and skilled editors. We generally ask for our articles to be about half a page, so about 350 words, but sometimes we get very long articles.

coming in. And we have a really expert editor who's ex-BBC who can take a 900 word article and cut it down to 350 words and he's still telling the same story. So, you know, we rely on those skills to enable us to get the paper out every month. It's brilliant the level of skill that's involved and I know that as soon as we finish with one month it feels like we need to do the month after. So it's constantly a rolling thing. So how are you able to keep the momentum up?

and do it every month is amazing. Cavish & Pinch, like you said, it's just celebrated its 60th birthday. What are the plans for the next year, the next few years? one of the things we've tried to do is to increase our internet presence. So we have a website which carries the paper and the news stories from the paper every month. At the moment, that's free to access and it doesn't have advertising sponsorship. So you might think that the way forward in the future

could be to have some sort of paywall in order to pay for it. So we might go more online. But the fact is that a lot of people have said to us that they spend a large part of their day in front of a computer screen or looking at their screen on their phone and that they actually really enjoy the idea of sitting down with a physical paper and putting away the screens for a little while. So I think that there is a role for the paper

in its physical form for some time yet. And yes, we will have to adapt and evolve our content to make it continually relevant to our readership. But for me, in many ways, the biggest issue that we're trying to address is to making people more aware of the fact that the Cavisham Bridge is out there. Because the number of times you'll go to a public event, for example, with a stall to sell the paper, to try and recruit new readers,

Maria Lloyd (14:26.924)
The number of people who come up to you and say, well, I've never heard of this. I didn't know there was a local paper serving our area. And yet we've been here for 60 years. So it's not uncommon to have someone say to me, I've lived here for 30 years and I didn't know there was a local paper. So we've somehow got to make people better aware of it. And hopefully that will increase our readership, which is the key thing because an increasing readership helps to pay for the cost of printing and design.

and also helps to encourage advertisers as well. I like that you said how you go to fairs normally to get more readership and to promote. How else do you try and actively promote or ways that you would like to start promoting? We often go to things like the Artists and Makers Fair, for example, we'll have a stall there and again, that would be about meeting and greeting people and familiarizing them with the paper. We've booked a stall at the

farmers market in think March so that we can be out there where lots of people around on a Sunday morning and had reports of and seen how buzzing it can be down in the centre of Cavisham on a Sunday morning. We're doing various events over the next few months. For example, there's a Christmas tree sale on the 7th of December. We will have a table there. And it's a matter really of just trying to raise the profile and if people are

wish to subscribe then they can pay their £7 a year subscription there and then and they can get the payback delivered as of then. We sometimes will do free copies of the paper through doors along the street to see if we can recruit people that way. The best and most effective way of gaining new subscribers is actually an interpersonal exchange. Talking to people that you meet and saying, have you heard of the Cavish and Brugge?

and then just explaining to them what it's about. And one of the things I think that makes the Caversham Bridge as a paper different from almost anything else you'll find is our focus on our community, on people in our community, and on good news. We don't focus on reporting the crime and the bad things that are going on in society because we know that there's other papers and local radio

Maria Lloyd (16:49.912)
that are covering all of that. And we try to balance that, if you like, by giving people information about things that are going on in terms of what charities are doing in the area and just trying to help people to understand that there are good things going on in our community as well as the things they see reported in the radio. I think you're right. There is so much negativity in the news and you think they just focus on the negative stories, but there are so many good stories.

people helping and all these lovely little ones that don't get picked up. So yeah, I really like the Caversham Bridge for that. Where can people pick up the Caversham Bridge? Which stores? Whereabouts in Caversham? So it's sold in Four Bears Bookshop and Nude Store in the centre of Caversham. It's also sold in True Food Co-op in Emma Green and it's available in the Weller Centre and the Milestone Centre respectively.

and it's also sold at Shea Butter Cottage, which is at the top of Donkin Hill on the Henley Road. And in addition to that, most of the churches will have a supply of the Caversham Bridge at the back of the church with an honesty box for people to buy it there. Brilliant. Do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to leave our listeners with? I think one thing that has really struck me in the last few years is the amount of goodwill that's out there, but the amount of talent there is.

in our community and we started fairly early on a series called Creative Cavisham which a friend of mine, Alistair Lee, suggested and we thought it would be a matter of interviewing one or two creative people maybe every few months or so on and we've ended up finding that we can find somebody creative in our community every month to interview and we've been doing that now for four years and we still have a list of people to go and talk to. So I think uncovering

the depth of talent, in that case, the creative scene, but also more recently we started to cover sporting endeavor and you suddenly find that there's, for example, we just carried an article about an 11 year old BMX rider who's riding BMX at an international standard who lives in Caversham. And there are all sorts of people here with all sorts of talents and it's just nice to share that.

Maria Lloyd (19:15.148)
with our community. I think that's a brilliant thing to leave people with Phil. Thank you so much for time. I thoroughly enjoyed our talk and yes if anyone's listening to this please go and buy the Calvishon Bridge. Thank you.