A media house built to outlast its owners.
Montlior Group exists to fund careful journalism and to protect the conditions in which it can be made.
Ownership as an act of stewardship.
Montlior Group is a holding company, not a newsroom. Our task is to allocate capital, appoint capable people, and then leave them alone to do the work.
The Group was founded in Meridale in 1962 with one title and eleven staff. It now comprises three businesses — journalism, advertising representation and regulated press distribution — employing roughly 6,400 colleagues and reaching an average of 84.6 million people each month.
What has not changed is the structure of the bargain. Commercial success pays for reporting; reporting earns the trust that makes commercial success possible. When those two things are confused, both are lost. The Editorial Independence Charter, adopted in 2018 and overseen by a standing committee of the Board, exists to keep them separate in practice and not merely in principle.
We take a deliberately long view. The founding family retains a controlling interest, which allows the Group to invest through cycles that would be difficult to justify against a quarterly horizon — and to decline the acquisitions that would be easy to justify and wrong to make.
The only thing a reader cannot verify for themselves is whether we were trying to tell the truth. Everything we do is designed to make that answer obvious.Naoko Vaudrey, Group Chief Executive
Six commitments, unchanged since the Charter.
Independence
Editorial decisions are made in the newsroom. No advertiser, shareholder or director may direct coverage, and every attempt is logged and reported to the Board.
Accuracy
Corrections are published promptly, in the same place and at the same prominence as the error. In 2025 we published 1,204 of them.
Stewardship
We are custodians of an archive that begins in 1962. It is maintained, digitised and kept open — including the parts we would rather forget.
Reach
Nineteen countries, twenty-seven titles and a wire that reaches newsrooms, exchanges and terminals within seconds of release.
People
6,400 colleagues, of whom 2,900 are journalists. We train our own, and we defend them when the work is unpopular.
Responsibility
Committed to net zero across owned operations by 2035, with printing and distribution — our largest sources — reported separately each year.
The heritage timeline.
Six decades, three businesses and one owner.
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1962
A single title
Aldric Montlior founds the Montlior Press in two rooms above a printworks on Chancery Quay, Meridale. The Meridale Chronicle publishes its first edition on 4 September, with a staff of eleven and a press borrowed on credit.
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1971
The second press
Acquisition of the Coravian Courier doubles circulation overnight and gives the Group its first presses outside the capital. The two mastheads are kept editorially separate — a decision that sets the pattern for everything after.
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1984
Representation
Montlior Media is established to sell and steward advertising across a portfolio that by then runs to nine titles. It is constituted as a separate company with its own board — the first structural firewall between commerce and the newsroom.
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1996
The Wire
Montlior Wire begins distributing regulated company announcements to newsrooms and exchanges. What starts as a service to the Group’s own financial desks becomes, within a decade, its most international business.
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2003
Digital editions
Every masthead publishes online. The Group declines to make its journalism free, a decision that costs it audience for eight years and subscribers ever since.
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2011
A public company
Montlior Group lists on the Meridale Stock Exchange under the ticker MTLR. The founding family retains a controlling interest through a dual-class structure written expressly to protect editorial independence.
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2018
The Charter
The Editorial Independence Charter is adopted and a standing committee of the Board is established to enforce it. Its annual report is published in full, unedited by management.
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2024
The archive, opened
Sixty-two years of the Chronicle are digitised with the Coravian National Library and made searchable without charge to schools, universities and public libraries.
Montlior House, Chancery Quay.
The Group has occupied the same quarter of Meridale since 1962, though the building has changed three times. Montlior House opened in 2014 on the site of the original printworks; the presses are gone, but the archive remains two floors below the newsroom, which is where the founder insisted it should stay.
