'Andover Advertiser had a great 2024 - thank you for your support'

It’s been a busy year, and our team has seen some changes, but the Andover Advertiser has gone from strength to strength, reporting on the town’s twists and turns, representing all walks of life.  

We have grown our website massively during 2024 and are now regularly seeing more than 300,000 visitors each month.  

We have a huge social media following – with more than 18,000 people following us on Facebook and nearly 4,500 people following us on X. We’ve grown our Instagram account, launched a Whatsapp Channel, posted videos to our Tiktok channel, started a Threads account and even recently made the leap onto Bluesky. There are now more ways to consume your Andover Advertiser than ever before.  

Our newsletters have exploded in popularity, and we’ve launched different types, so you can get the news you want directly in your email inbox every day. The Morning Briefing and Daily Round-up newsletters are the most popular, with around 1,000 people signed up for each. We also have crime, business, or specific area newsletters – and we are soon to launch an exclusive subscriber newsletter.  

That brings me neatly to subscribers, our biggest fans. More than 200 people already support the Advertiser in this way. Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the digital subscription.

I have spoken about the benefits of digital subscriptions before, but for just £2.99 per month (plus there are many great offers to sign up), readers can get full access to our website, with fewer ads, and can get a whole host of reader offers and competitions. They can also access a digital replica of that week’s printed newspaper – even before the physical papers have landed in the shops. Plus, there’s a nifty archive which goes back to 2020, which is great for research. 

And that's not to say we are just here for the subscribers, all website users get 20 free articles per month, then another 20 when they log in (which is free, just need to verify your email address).  

Yes, some of our best content goes behind a paywall, as it costs us money to produce, but digital subscribers get access to it before it goes into the printed newspaper. Another great reason to sign up.  

To complement this, we are due to launch an app in January. Anyone can download the app – and even without a digital subscription, they can access two free articles per month. So why not give it a try? It’s available on the Apple app store or on Google’s Play Store.  

Aside from all these digital innovations, what has made the Andover Advertiser stand out is what has made it great for more than 160 years – quality local news.  

We have a core team of four reporters – Kiran, Lola, Matt and Caroline know the patch, they are great at their jobs, and they all work incredibly hard to make sure the Advertiser has new and interesting items several times per day.  

They are overseen by Emily Roberts, a long-standing and very experienced local journalist. Megan Stanley has been largely responsible for the Advertiser's digital growth, expanding onto other platforms and adapting to their frequent algorithm changes with unflappable grace.  

This year, we have adopted AI into our work, with the help of an AI-assisted reporter Sophie, and that’s made us more efficient at representing our community.

Over the year, we have been involved in so many community projects, helped so many charities and shone a light on so many issues. It would be impossible to list them all here.  

But I just want to say a genuine thank you to everyone who supports us as we try our very best to champion Andover and give voices to people who would not normally be heard in our ever-busy digital lives.

And please do keep buying the printed newspaper, too; we put a lot of work into it each week, and even though I say so myself, it’s a very good read!