New Archant CEO Lorna Willis may have been promoted from within, but she has the revolutionary verve of an outsider. Her mission: to save local news.

Willis could be described as unconventional – she speaks a mile a minute, moving between commercial insights and impassioned pleas about the need to protect local titles, with a frankness uncommon among her peers.

“They didn’t go with a suit,” she tells me of her appointment to run the UK’s fourth largest local newspaper group.