An interesting snippet has arrived from my home city, Nottingham.

It concerns newspapers, and local newspapers in particular. Fill in the missing word in a headline involving the worlds 'local' and 'newspapers' and in recent years it would most likely be closure or reduction in frequency.

But what have we here? The Northcliffe-owned Nottingham Post Media Group is in talks to acquire the Nottingham and Long Eaton Topper.

As per an earlier blog on the subject of hyper-local publishing, it's fascinating to see how the right model and ethos can generate success in seemingly unpromising areas.

Topper Newspapers was set up by the late Lionel Pickering, a pioneer of free newspapers who created the midlands-based Trader newspapers some 45 years ago.  He sold the Trader titles to Thomson in 1989 for ?25m. Like that other local newspaper legend, Sir Ray Tindle, it seems Pickering was in possession of some alchemical form of publishing magic dust.

His Topper titles now lay claim to being the biggest free, independent (until the Northcliffe deal goes through at least) titles in the country, with some 212,000 copies delivered a week.

My highly-scientific analysis of what makes the Topper so popular involved asking an expert. My dad, who is an avid reader reports back thus: "It's a better paper than the Recorder. It has more interesting, local articles," declares Mr Francis.

He's talking about the Nottingham and Long Eaton Recorder, a now defunct free local newspaper that ceased printing in July and was published by - you guessed it - Northcliffe.