Plans to launch a thrice-weekly newspaper in Scarborough have been scrapped after the head of the project admitted the plan was too ambitious.
Scraborough Voice editor Steven Thurston instead aims to launch a new monthly magazine in the town next year.
He initially planned to launch the paper in September 2012, after Johnston Press announced plans to convert the Scarborough Evening News from a daily to a weekly.
Thurston said at the time that there was "a huge gap for daily news, there’s an awful lot of news in the area, and people can’t wait for a weekly – people want a daily newspaper".
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He told Press Gazette today that the area was still deprived of local news and that he hoped to launch a newspaper in the future.
He added: "They were very ambitious plans but we are looking at, maybe a couple of years into the future, [launching] a newspaper.
"But it will be a quality project. We wouldn’t want to have launched something that would have folded within a week."
In addition to the monthly magazine, which will be handed out free to households in the area, Thurston is also running a website featuring rolling news.
Thurston, a designer, works on the site alongside one other full-time editorial member of staff. The Voice also relies on content coming through from its website, where readers are encouraged to submit articles.
The monthly magazine will launch in March, six months after Thurston originally intended the thrice-weekly to launch.
The new title will collaborate with the monthly Scarborough Advertiser and make it a more editorial-based operation. There will be 20,000 copies delivered per month.
There will be less pages, 32 instead of 48, but the title will be A4 sized rather than A5. Thurston says the Advertiser has gone from “strength to strength” and ran to just 16 pages long this time last year.
On the launch of the monthly magazine, Thurston said: “We wanted to give Scarborough something, so we are improving our current magazine and doubling its size."
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