LET’S get the bad news out of the way first. From next Monday the price of your South Wales Argus will increase to 65p per day.

There is no hiding the fact that this is a substantial rise and that is why I am telling you about it personally today, and explaining why it is necessary.

Here is the good news. You will be getting more for your money.

From next Monday, your Argus will be bigger and better every day.

There will be more news, sport and information in every edition.

We will be publishing an average of eight extra pages of the news that matters to you every day of the week.

And there will be new sections.

On Tuesdays our popular fortnightly Business Update supplement will become a weekly pullout.

On Saturdays a new pull-out – It’s The Weekend – will take a look at what the people of Gwent get up to at the weekends in a new magazine- style supplement.

From September we will be putting the focus on junior and grassroots sport with a new midweek pull-out.

Later in the summer we will be launching an Argus app, allowing you to read your Argus on your mobile phone or tablet – and it will be free for readers who buy the paper.

And we’re giving our readers the chance to win some great prizes right through the summer.

This week we’re continuing our £2,000 holiday spending money giveaway.

Keep buying your Argus over the coming weeks to be in with a chance to have your gas, electricity and car fuel bills paid for a year.

We’re making your Argus bigger and better because we want to retain your loyalty – and because we need to meet the challenges of an ever-tougher market for regional newspapers.

Traditional advertising platforms, which allowed us to bring you an unrivalled local news service, have suffered greatly during the economic downturn.

This, combined with the digital information revolution, which has meant that anyone, anywhere can access news in many different formats, has provided a significant challenge for your Argus.

Now we need to fully meet that challenge, and to that end we are taking on more staff as well as increasing substantially the local news coverage in the paper.

We are making a significant investment to ensure you get a bigger and better Argus every day.

However, this investment in additional content, staff and pages has to be funded.

Increasing our cover price to 65p amounts to a weekly increase of £1.20 and it is important to keep that in perspective.

A Mars bar costs more than a single edition of the Argus and a whole week of your favourite local newspaper costs little more than a pint of beer, or a couple of cups of coffee.

It comes down to what value you place on a local newspaper which employs journalists to cover local news, which understands what’s important to local communities, and which fights local campaigns.

I hope you’ll agree with me that 65p a day is a price worth paying for this.

I hope you will enjoy your bigger and better Argus from next Monday. Let me know what you think. We value and need your support.