Every week through our letterbox comes a copy of our free weekly newspaper The Wymondham Mercury. That is until now.
For some reason I decided to have a look at this week's copy online before it arrived and there tucked away on page 21 was a message to say that the print edition of the newspaper would be stopping.
Over the past year or so the paper has been deteriorating with virtually no editorial content apart from a few court cases. I have pretty much taken to thumbing thorough it before chucking it into the bin within about a minute. This is immensely sad for me as a former sub editor and then sports editor on the weekly series of newspapers owned by Eastern Counties Newspapers who then became Archant and who are now somebody else. We had a thriving set up at Prospect House in the centre of Norwich. This is now owned by an insurance company. There were branch offices in every sizeable Norfolk town. These are now shut.
I remember the launch of the Wymondham Mercury. I remember the huge number of news pages and I take pride that each week we had five or six pages of local sport in all our weekly titles. As sports editor I was always keen to have as big a presence for sport as possible.
I have watched as the written media has declined in the face of social media and online news and the announcement that the Wyomondham Mercury will be no more doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It surprises me that it has existed as long as it has - being a very second rate publication where the sports content has been a re-hash of old Norwich City Football Club news.
One of the first ever provincial weekly newspapers was the Norwich Mercury which had a massive history and played a big part in Norwich life for many years. Overnight this stopped production and decades of history were destroyed in one fell swoop. Again sadness that something so special could just stop. Same happened with the Pink Un - the weekly football paper which came out on a Saturday evening. To all intent and purposes it stopped although the name remained as part of the Eastern Daily Press' sports coverage.
I know we must all face up to reality. Fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers and most now get their news from television or online but that doesn't prevent me from feeling very sad about what has happened and what looks likely to continue to happen. I am just grateful that I lived and worked through what was a glorious period for local journalism. I feel I can have pride in working at a time when local newspapers were at the hub of the community. I remember when the weekly group of papers I worked for saw their circulation figures top 100,000 a week. I remember when the circulation of the EDP was around 90,000. Today I don't think it's much more than 20,000 (I stand to be corrected on that one).
I know you can't bring back the past and I know the world moves on, but the last seven days have been very sad ones for a number of reasons.