When it comes to publications and sources of local news that is accessible to everyone in Portsmouth, nothing comes close to Portsmouth City Council’s Flagship magazine, which celebrates it’s 20th birthday this spring. Flagship drops through the letterbox of every home and is full of information from the council concerning a wide variety of local issues and projects and as such is a perfect glimpse in to the day to day history of the last 20 years.
You can view a collection of the Flagship covers over on the PCC Flickr, below are a few covers, including the first.
Martin
14 June
Smelliest, useful magazine ever!
John Bagnall
14 June
It’s good that Flagship has stayed the course and become a success. All credit to the team behind it, over the years, for making it so.
I’ve got a particularly soft spot for it, as it was my idea, back when I worked for the City Council as its marketing communications manager (job titles in local government were just as clunky then as they remain today).
Producing and delivering a free information magazine to Portsmouth households wasn’t a particularly easy concept to get up and running at the time. But I negotiated the the backing of key councillors across all Portsmouth’s political groupings (Ian Gibson for the Tories, Syd Rapson for Labour and Mike Hancock for the Lib Dems) and made a successful bid for the necessary (very modest!) budget from a discretionary “promotion of Portsmouth” budget controlled by the then chief executive, Richard Trist.
What was so pleasing then, and I hope remains true today, was that all of the politicians were able to unit behind a proposal intended for the benefit of the Portsmouth community at large, rather than for any specific interests within it.
That’s a feature of Portsmouth that, for all the frustrations we might feel from time to time about living in the “Strong Island”, I genuinely believe sets Pompey apart from other places you could choose to live in.
Paul Gonella
15 June
Thank you John for the amazing insight in to this city institution!