What is the future of newspapers? It’s a frequent subject for debate and of navel-gazing by both the local and national press. Local newspapers are being closed as increasing numbers of people get their news from other sources, such as online sites and social media. There is speculation about the imminent death of the press. This is a shame, given the newspaper industry’s long history. For the past couple of centuries, the local press was people’s main source of news, a way of feeling connected to one’s local community.

But how did the local press operate, and who worked for these newspapers? Firstly, the 18th century concept of a local press differed from how we – or even our Victorian ancestors – would view it. Berrow’s Worcester Journal, said to be the oldest surviving local newspaper in England, was originally The Worcester Post-Man, established in 1709. In its early days, it was owned, printed and edited by the same man – Stephen Bryan. Despite this one-man operation, Bryan managed to distribute the paper over a wide area, from Gloucester to Wolverhampton.

It was more regional, then, than local. The Journal, as it became known in the mid-18th century, was published early in the morning, and prided itself on having established regular communication with correspondents in London, who passed on city news so quickly that they even beat the London papers.

This, though, shows a problem with the local press at this time – little of the news was actually local. The local newspapers took their information, as suggested above, from other publications – the London and foreign newspapers.

What we would call plagiarism today, they saw simply as a legitimate means of accessing information. Often, the same story would appear verbatim in various newspapers across Britain.

Correspondents
Although more local news was being included in the local press by the second half of the 18th century, it took time for this to develop. An important element of the newspaper’s circle was the correspondent – the individual who would write to the editor either to tip him off about something that had happened in his part of the newspaper’s area, or to speculate about events or individuals. Some passed on letters they had been sent detailing news, whereas others wanted to publicise events that affected them – such as the introduction of mechanisation into traditional local industries such as spinning, and the associated riots that later took place. Other individuals would act as agents for the press, listening in at coffee-houses and taverns for any gossip that could be passed on to the local newspaper.

By the early 19th century, local newspapers were increasingly able to cover local news events. Crime became a relatively easy type of story to include, with Petty Sessions, Quarter Sessions and Assize cases often being reported. The multitude of Petty Sessions enabled papers to cover many of the towns in their circulation area – for example, Jackson’s Oxford Journal covered cases from Banbury in the north to Henley in the south. Reporters would sit in court or at inquests and duly report on events. They often had to rely on memory as note-taking was frequently forbidden, so the accuracy of such reports could vary.

In Suffolk, the local papers were able to cover the murder of Maria Marten by William Corder in 1828 in graphic detail, the Ipswich Journal eagerly stating that “a dreadful crime has been brought to light, at Polstead in this county”. The story had much that the local press knew would attract its readers – murder, sex, a young woman, and a mother’s apparent psychic dream about what had happened to her daughter. Although the Journal did not name the reporter, it did state that at the inquest, “the room was exceedingly crowded [and] amongst the persons present, we noticed Sr William Rowley, Bart”. The newspaper was keen to stress the ‘we’ – the fact that its reporter had been at the inquest in person to note the various local community members attending.

A reporter’s life
Even early on, there was a distrust of some local reporters. The Morning Post – a London paper – reported in 1819 that at a meeting of local magistrates in Stafford, where a debate was to take place about whether to increase the county’s armed forces, “a newspaper reporter, who had got into the room, was desired to withdraw”. Even today, local reporters are asked to leave a town council meeting in order for councillors to discuss more ‘confidential’ matters. A couple of years later, the same paper mocked a man who was threatened with an action for assault “on the sacred person of a Newspaper Reporter!! [sic]”.

This did not stop people wanting to become reporters. Many worked their way up from the bottom, from humble backgrounds, and John Charles Manning was one example. Born in 1827 in Fazeley in Staffordshire, he grew up in Leamington, Warwickshire, the son of a book-keeper. At the age of 12, he got a job as a ‘printer’s devil’ – an apprentice mainly occupied in fetching type – for the Leamington Spa Courier. The Courier had started on 9 August 1828 at offices in Wise Street, Leamington. It was published every Saturday but the actual time of publication varied according to when the London news was received, in order to ensure that news received in the morning would make the same day’s edition of the local newspaper. The paper contained advertisements for local businesses, news about local fetes and church services, poems and theatrical launches, as well as more general news.

Press rivalry
The Courier was not the first local newspaper in Leamington – that honour had gone to the Warwickshire Chronicle, which had launched two years earlier in response to “a craving of Leamingtonians for a newspaper of their own”. Locals wanted their town to be written about accurately, believing that other newspapers treated their town rather condescendingly, and so the editor told his staff that he “intended to devote a due portion of this paper to Leamington and its affairs, to excite still more the public attention to its beauties… and its pleasures”. Therefore the aim of the paper was not just to tell local people the news, but also to publicise the local area to those from further afield.

In 1835, the owner of the Courier, James Sharp, decided to expand his local newspaper business, and announced plans to expand into the county town, Warwick, creating the Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard. It would be published at midday every Saturday in Warwick High Street (“two doors from Messrs Greenway and Greaves’s Bank”). In his autobiography, Manning stated that “It was an exciting event in the history of local journalism… that siege and bombardment of Warwick by the Courier for journalistic foothold in the county town”.

Rival newspapers put up posters round the town promoting themselves – including in all the pubs as well as at Warwick Castle. The expansion of the paper was seen as good for the county, with residents believing that the end result would be an impressive paper that would cover all the local political and arts news as well inform readers about the world beyond Warwickshire.

The timing of this expansion was significant. The tax on newspapers was first reduced in the mid 1830s, and then repealed in the 1850s. The ending of newspaper duties, first introduced in 1712, and the introduction of a cheap, reliable postal system in 1840 made newspapers both cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy. The Victorian era saw newspapers develop and grow, serving the public’s need for information and news. In Oxfordshire alone, seven local newspapers were established between 1855 and 1870, creating competition for Jackson’s Oxford Journal, which had existed since 1753. These papers were mainly centred around the local market towns and their growing populations, such as Banbury, Bicester and Thame.

Reporters’ careers
It is often hard to track the careers of many of the local reporters working for these expanding publications, both because of the nature of reporting in the 19th century, where bylines were rarely used, and because the censuses did not often name the publication an individual worked for (many were simply listed as ‘reporter’ or ‘journalist’). For example, in 1848, Berrow’s Worcester Journal included on its front page a report on a sanitary reform meeting at Stratford-upon-Avon, that had come “from our own Local Reporter”. However, some papers did occasionally mention their writers – in the Leeds Mercury in 1852, there was a reference to a Mr TH Broadbent, “local reporter and agent to the Leeds Times newspapers”. Of course, some of the reporters were not professional writers, but those who had witnessed events and notified the press. In 1863, the Huddersfield Chronicle reported that “the little town of Leigh, in Lancashire, has just witnessed a scene which the local reporter describes as extraordinary”.

There is no evidence that this was a reporter paid by the Chronicle, but more of an interested bystander, or perhaps even a regular contact who would let the paper know if something had happened in his locality. Frank Wragg Ashton, aged 17, was unusual, in that he described himself as “reader, Guardian Office” in 1881, showing that he was employed by the Manchester Guardian. In 1901, Edward Edgar, aged 24, originally from Stafford, stated that he was a reporter on the daily paper in Nottingham, where he was lodging.

Other local reporters are known now because they went on to ‘bigger’ things. The father of the ‘self-help’ movement Samuel Smiles, originally a medical student, wrote for the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle and the Leeds Times in the 1830s, for example. His motivation was not for literary glory – instead, he aimed for a political career and used his articles to argue for parliamentary reform. John Manning went onto the Warwick Advertiser, the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, and then gained his first editorship, of the Tunbridge Wells Gazette, before later moving on to report for the Times. But others were less successful or had more fluctuating success.

The 1911 census records 84-year-old Alfred Huxford as an inmate of the Portsmouth Workhouse. Alfred, although a pauper, still proudly listed his occupation as a newspaper reporter. Thirty years earlier, he had been a working journalist, living with his aunt and his cousins, who worked as seamstresses and manglers. From a fairly poor background, Alfred had managed to become a professional writer, before sinking back into poverty. John Adams, a 38-year-old Dubliner, was living in the Christchurch Workhouse in Southwark in 1911, still describing himself as “journalist, reporter”. Given that he is not present in the 1901 English census, John may have moved to England to seek his fortune – relatively – as a journalist, but failed. Becoming a journalist was one way to ensure financial security for a time, but it did not always last.

News far and wide
By the end of the 19th century, there was a good network of local newspapers across the country, well-established in their communities. Yet they still supplemented their local stories within news taken from other papers in different localities. The Nottinghamshire Guardian in 1895, for example, included stories about a highway robbery in London, a burglary trial in Norfolk, and a murder-suicide in Sparkhill, Birmingham.

The gorier the story, the more likely a newspaper would be to publish it, even if it was not local. But the Nottinghamshire paper also included local political news, including summaries of county council news from adjacent counties, recognising that these might have an impact on Nottinghamshire residents, and that people from Derbyshire, for example, might read the Nottingham papers. Even today, the Nottingham Post also serves part of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire as well as its own county – so has to cover a wider range of news than might be expected.

The local newspaper industry grew to a peak in the mid-20th century. Circulations were high due to the extensive local news coverage such newspapers could offer. Men and women would start their careers on provincial newspapers, perhaps as apprentices or, later, trainees, before going on to Fleet Street, the job giving them a solid grounding in news reporting. Newspapers published district editions, enabling them to really be part of their local communities. Today, there is a reversal, of sorts, back to the days of the 18th century press – fewer reporters, fewer local stories, and more reliance on other sources of information. And one day in the future, all the talk of the death of the local press will be, itself, old news.

Further reading
• The Worcester News website has an informative section detailing the history of Berrow’s Worcester Journal
• Warwickshire Chronicle/Leamington Courier information taken from Glimpses of our Local Past: Leamington, 1800-1894 by JC Manning (C Forster, Leamington, 1991)