Building communities
The philosophy behind the Leveller®Publishing Group is that newspapers should be about building communities. We serve a diverse rural population of market towns and just one city (with a population smaller than several of the market towns)! The county of Somerset has poor public transport, is poorly served by broadband and has newspapers focused for the most part on one town or one community.
Our ideal is to bring communities together through our work. To present news that is relevant in every corner of Somerset. Sometimes that will be national news with local implications. At others it will be showing how something that happens in one community, can have consequences for others. Sometimes we compare and contrast performance and events from one District to the next.
Our overriding ambition though is to provide news content for all of Somerset for it to be fresh, relevant and to bring the community together through a damn good read!
Part of that commitment, given the rural nature of Somerset, involves distributing our papers in an unorthodox way. Many communities have lost their school, their pub or their shop in recent years. Sometimes all 3. So we have a unique and varied collection of distribution points across Somerset. They include post offices, community halls, church porches, community shops and yes, even on occasion, newsagents too….
The success of our venture was recognised early on in our endeavour when we won the Somerset Small Business of the Year award in the somerset Business Awards in 2012. We were also finalists in the South West section of the Rural Business Awards 2018.