The Daily Mail & General Trust is converting the daily Bath Chronicle into a weekly, leaving its website to handle breaking news.
Publishing six days a week, the Bath Chronicle is one of the smallest local papers in Britain, but the new 60p weekly version - which will appear on Thursdays - will be one of the largest at about 250 pages.
Journalists at the evening paper face compulsory redundancies as a result of the paper's "historic move" announced today after years of speculation.
"The staff have worked fantastically well to try and keep the Chronicle as a daily title but in a fast changing multimedia world we now feel the paper's long term future will be best secured by converting to a weekly title," said Sam Holliday, the Chronicle editor.
"It is our belief that we will create the best weekly newspaper in Britain - and in our opinion Bath deserves the best."
The paper will "regularly update" its website thisisbath.co.uk with breaking news.
"We fully believe that this move will be very good for our advertisers as well as for our readers," said the Chronicle's commercial director Sarah Irvine.
"We want to give our advertisers the best possible response to their adverts and we believe this exciting and bold move will create a much bigger market, which should help all of our highly valued customers to benefit."
Northcliffe, the regional newspaper division of DMGT, expect that the final daily edition of the Chronicle will appear on Friday September 21, with the first weekly edition hitting the streets the following Thursday.
Mr Holliday said that the change to the Chronicle would put the city firmly on the map. "Bath is a city which is historically known for being innovative and the Chronicle move fits that ethos perfectly," he added.
"No one else has ever attempted to do what we're about to do and no one else will end up with the high quality paper that we are committed to producing.
"This is a very exciting time and we know our readers and advertisers will support us as we make this important move to secure the future of our precious local newspaper."
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