The Isle of Wight County Press is a local, compact newspaper published every Friday on the Isle of Wight. It has an audited circulation of 36,663 copies, compared to a local population of 110-132,000, with a readership approaching 90% of the Island's adult population. The paper has been owned locally since its foundation.
The Isle of Wight County Press website was launched in 1999 and features headline articles updated on a daily basis. These will often appear on the website before featuring in the next issue, allowing readers to be updated daily instead of each week. The website also features videos and photo galleries that would not normally be available in a standard issue. During June 2009 the website passed 1 million views for the first time, attracting a record figure of 1,001,705 coupled with another record of 71,068 unique visitors. The increase in visitor numbers was said to have been boosted by interest in the Isle of Wight Council election results and Isle of Wight Festival coverage.
The first compact issue was released on 3 October 2008. Prior to this the paper had always been published in a broadsheet format. The change was made in a response to surveys carried out by the paper in November 2007 claiming 87 percent of islanders in favour of a compact format. Following the first release of the first compact issue, many islanders found the smaller size unsuitable for use on some jobs such as bee keeping.
Famous quotes containing the words isle, wight, county and/or press:
“It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man’s busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“She that was ever fair, and never proud,
Had tongue at will, and yet was never loud
...
She that could think, and ne’er disclose her mind,
See suitors following, and not look behind.
She was a wight, if ever such wight were—
To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In the County Tyrone, in the town of Dungannon,”
—Unknown. The Old Orange Flute (l. 1)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)