Private limited company | |
Industry | Media |
Founded | 1845 |
Founder | Jacob Henry Tillett, Jeremiah Colman, John Copeman and Thomas Jarrold |
Headquarters | Norwich, United Kingdom |
Key people
|
Jeff Henry (Chief Executive) Simon Bax (Chairman) |
Products | Newspapers, magazines |
Revenue | £131 million (2012) |
Number of employees
|
Approx. 1,500 |
Divisions | Archant Life Archant Specialist |
Subsidiaries | KOS Media |
Website | www.archant.co.uk |
Archant Limited is a newspaper and magazine publishing company headquartered in Norwich, England, United Kingdom. The group publishes four daily newspapers, around 50 weekly newspapers, and 80 consumer and contract magazines.
Archant employs around 1,500 employees, mainly in East Anglia, the Home counties and the West Country, and was known as Eastern Counties Newspapers Group until March 2002.
The company began publishing in Norwich in 1845 with Norfolk News, backed by Jacob Henry Tillet, Jeremiah Colman, John Copeman and Thomas Jarrold. The Colman and Copeman families still retain close involvement in the business.
The Eastern Weekly Press was launched in 1867 and in 1870 was renamed the Eastern Daily Press. A sister title, the Eastern Evening News, was launched in 1882.
As the business grew it moved premises in 1902, 1959 and again in the late 1960s to its present headquarters location at Prospect House in the centre of Norwich.
At the end of the 1960s, Eastern Counties Newspapers merged with the East Anglian Daily Times Company, publisher of the East Anglian Daily Times, to form Eastern Counties Newspapers Group (ECNG).
ECNG developed further with the launch of Community Media Limited in 1981, a weeklies publishing operation based in Bath, which launched and acquired titles in Scotland and the West Country.
In 1985, ECNG purchased the East Anglia-based Advertiser group of weekly free newspapers. These businesses operated as separate entities until the mid-1990s when they were brought together under the ECNG banner.
ECNG acquired four weekly newspapers in Huntingdon, Ely, Wisbech and March from Thomson in 1993. The acquisition of Peterhead-based P Scrogie followed shortly afterwards.
The company moved into Internet publishing in 1996 when it launched Eastern Counties Network, a Web-based service using copy from its four daily newspapers as well as original material. Later this was disaggregated into separate websites for each of the newspapers.