It’s never a good thing when you get a late night email invitation to an 8.30am meeting…on a Friday, so it was with a certain air of trepidation that our normally reasonably cheery band of editors signed in to a call to hear what some of us had been expecting for some time.

Despite half anticipating the news it was still something of a shock to hear that Tindle Newspapers - the owner of The Abergavenny Chronicle and its sister papers - had been sold and that from 9am we all had new employers.

The rest of the day was devoted to the usual flurry of ‘will we have jobs on Monday’ phone calls and meetings with our former Tindle bosses all while putting together this week’s paper and updating our websites.

It was an unsettling time for everyone, punctuated only by regular social media posts which ranged from ‘we’ll miss the old team’ to ‘good riddance - the current editor and staff have wrecked the paper’- mainly penned by those with status profiles which pronounce ‘ in a world where you can be anything…be kind’!

For those of us who have worked for Tindle for many years - apart from a brief sojourn my current spell as editor has spanned more than two decades - it was shock to realise we were no longer part of the family firm started by Sir Ray Tindle so many years ago in a very different world.

It was world of regular visits from the man at the top who knew the name of every employee and would ask and care about their families.

It was a time when knowing that Sir Ray had opened his ‘little black book’ was not a reason to worry but a reason to expect a stream of jokes plucked from the life-long collection lovingly recorded in the notebook he carried everywhere with him.

It was a time when the only source of local news - apart from elevenses at the local cafe - was the local paper which was read by everyone who lived in the town and an awful lot of those who had left but still had ‘The Chron’ delivered by post every week.

Today things are much different, most young people would no more buy a local paper to read over their £5 soy milk chocoloco latte than they would watch an episode of Little Britain and as always newspapers have to adapt to this change and find new ways of disseminating reliable and unbiased news like our websites which are now used by hundreds of thousands of readers every month.

Having met the Chronicle’s new owners it reassuring to know their ethos allies closely with that of Tindle. From this week the paper is owned by the Iliffe family - which boasts a media empire dating back over 130 years with most of its papers based in towns like Abergavenny and happily, they are passionate about keeping local news in those towns.

For the moment the message is ‘business as usual’ but in an ever changing world change is inevitable. It’s a brave new world and one which I think will herald an exciting time for us all at The Chron.