The Abertillery and Ebbw Valleys Dynamic launched in 2015. The fortnightly newspaper was conceived by two local men, Tony Flatman and Julian Meek, who met in the library one quiet afternoon and got talking. They were both men of letters: Flatman had written reports on economic subjects, “the Channel tunnel and so on”, and Meek was a poet and one-time mayor of the town, with a bit of a newspaper background, having once worked as an editor’s assistant on regional papers. “I was very much in the old-school journalist tradition,” he says, “start at the bottom and end up at the bottom.” Chatting, they bemoaned the absence of any news coverage of the town – the Cardiff and Newport papers had long since given up offices in this corner of the valleys – and they thought there might be a niche for a paper that told heartfelt local stories with a bit of a smile on its face. “In London terms,” Flatman says, “we thought somewhere between the Guardian and Private Eye.”
