Merry Christmas and 2025 Round-up
As we approach the last few weeks of 2025, we just wanted to get in touch with a brief round-up of all The Post has achieved over 2025 and our plans for 2026.
Our Overall Goals
As a not-for-profit organisation working to support local communities, we are dedicated to publishing positive, relevant local news and information, and continue to focus our efforts on publishing in print to ensure as many members of our communities as possible can access their local community newspaper, regardless of circumstances.
As you can imagine, being a publication that is free to readers, and one that provides 70% of content space to VCSE organisations for free, covering the costs of print and distribution are a continual challenge.
Our ultimate goal is to be able to print and deliver a copy of the relevant area Post to every home in each borough we cover each month. This way, no one would miss out on important information including services that are available to them, events to attend, local groups to participate in, and any notices from councils that residents should be made aware of.
At some point over the next five years, we hope to achieve this, but it will need the support of larger local organizations, and for them to understand exactly what The Post is and the impact it has as a not-for-profit organisation supporting so many other VCSE organisations and residents across our local communities.
Our Work in 2025
This year, we met our goal of launching a Post for Salford, with the response from the Salford community having been incredibly positive - volunteers came forward and content was submitted before we even launched the first issue. We must also thank Salford Council who saw and understood what we were trying to do from the outset, and who have been incredibly supportive. We hope to be working with them more closely through 2026 and beyond.
We have continued to work with partners needing to get their newsletters and event programmes out to residents in print. These have been produced as fully branded supplements inside the relevant Post newspaper and include:
Funders such as Salix Homes and KAO Data sharing news about their fund, the recipients of funding and their projects.
Support organisations such as Age Friendly Manchester and the Withington & Old Moat Neighbourshood sharing their bi-annual/quarterly newsletters as fully branded, multi-page, pull-out supplements inside the relevant Post newspaper.
Event organisers including Chorlton Arts Festival and Poynton Arts Festival whose event programmes and venue maps were published as fully branded pull-out programmes inside the relevant Post newspaper.
Working with organisations to publish supplements has proved an effective way for organisations to not only reach more residents within their target area(s), but to do so at a much lower cost than producing their own stand-alone printed newsletter/programme. We hope to expand on this supplement model over 2026 and work with more organisations to help them get newsletters out in print.
If you would like to leave a review for Post Community Newspapers to let us and others know what you enjoy about The Post, how it may have helped you or your organisation, and what having a free, positive, community-focused newspaper means to you, it would be greatly appreciated and will help us to build our 2026 Social Impact Report. Please leave a review via goggle here
2026 and Beyond
2026 will see us continue to work to keep all of our current publications in print and to increase the print and door-to-door distribution of each area Post.
In spring 2026, we will be launching a Post for Bolton, with Posts for Bury and Tameside planned towards the end of 2026.
Since we switched the way we published The Post - moving from small, hyperlocal areas to borough-wide publications two years ago, it became our aim to 'complete the 10' by having a Post for each of the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester. This, of course, can only be achieved and sustained with financial support. Until we achieve this, we will look to initially publish online to ensure residents in our new target areas have at least some access to the sort of local, relevant and positive community-focused news The Post is known for.
Launch of a Subscription Service for Additional News
To mark 6 years celebrating positive local news, and with so much local news and information that needs to be shared, we are launching an additional online news service.
As a not-for-profit producing a free monthly newspaper, we are simply unable to accommodate all the content we receive. This is partly due to time restrictions, as we often receive news after we have begun the layout process, but also due to limited funds. While the printed newspaper is free to readers, the cost to us increases each time we add additional pages, And so we can only print the number of pages that we have the funds available to cover, meaning that the content we receive is often more than we can afford to print.
In order to ensure we can share any news that cannot be accommodated in the printed issue, and to also be able to share news that arrives too late for inclusion in the print issue, we are launching a subscription service where readers can receive weekly 'latest news' directly to their inbox - for free.
The Post Latest News subscription service will launch in January 2026 - Subscribe now!
Finally, we would just like to thank you for reading and supporting The Post over the last 12 months, and we hope you continue to enjoy your local community newspaper throughout 2026.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas.
Amanda, Mel and the Post Community Newspaper Team.
