Sunday Independent

[keef robin]

Just bought Sunday Independent, paper covers Bristol, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, parts of Wilts, Glos, Dorset, excellent sports paper, about 80 pages, with very good coverage of speedway at Somerset and Plymouth, bit about Swindon, and tables, fixtures, and results nationally. Do any areas have these dedicated sports papers with good speedway coverage?

[RobMcCaffery]

The Sunday Independent does a great job of covering sport in the south west. For years it was owned by the Daily Mirror who used it as a training ground for its young reporters. It is not connected in any way with the national Independent newspaper or the similarly-named Irish paper.

 

In more recent times it was owned by a small group called Tindle who sold it off to a manager a couple of years ago. After his death the paper actually went out of business in April this year, only to be saved by the chairman of Truro City after two weeks of non-publication. It publishes separate editions for Cornwall, where it is based, Plymouth, Devon, and Bristol and Somerset. It can be found as far north as Gloucester.

 

Regional Sunday papers tend to survive in areas where the London-based papers had problems in getting a paper with full coverage of Saturday's sport out in time for Sunday morning in certain areas. The Indy was mainly a news-based paper but switched emphasis over to sport a few years back.

 

As far as I know it's the only surviving Sunday sports paper, and with the march of the internet most of the old Saturday night sports papers (the various pinks, greens and even the odd 'buff-un') have gone, although I believe both Southampton and Portsmouth still have theirs. Even the famous Sports Argus in Birmingham, the Manchester Evening News Pink Final and the Liverpool Football Echo have all gone, with the M.E.N.'s version ending-up as a Sunday paper before its demise.

 

There are still regional Sundays but while sport is important, it is still secondary. Examples are the Midlands' Sunday Mercury, the north east's Sunday Sun (not connected at all to The Sun), Wales on Sunday, Liverpool's relative newcomer The Sunday Echo, and of course several titles in Scotland.

 

So, unless there's something out there I've missed the Sunday Independent is unique. Apart from, its dedicated speedway coverage many of the journalists involved have worked on speedway, covering Bristol, Exeter, St. Austell, as well the survivors in Plymouth and Somerset and their names have often graced copy and match reports in the Speedway Star.

 

There's been a long tradition of giving speedway strong coverage in Devon with both The Western Morning News and its former evening stablemates, the Exexter Express and Echo and the Plymouth Herald treating the sport with almost equal significance as football and rugby. Local TV was strong as well with the old head of Westward TVs sport being my boss in later years.

 

Long may the Sunday Indy survive and recover from this year's near death.

Edited May 28, 2017 by Rob McCaffery