Billy Kennedy on 50 years at the News Letter: My half century of informing, educating and entertaining

(Click here to read the first part of the recollection: ‘We were a close team that reported on terrorism - and on the good news in Northern Ireland too’)

It is ​50 years yesterday since I joined the News Letter and some of Northern Ireland's finest journalists have passed through the paper in my time.

Our travel editor Geoff Hill; news journalists Gareth Gordon, Chris Thornton and Mark Simpson (all currently with the BBC); Sam McBride (now Belfast Telegraph); David Young (Northern Ireland Press Association head); the late Ian Starrett, our Londonderry correspondent; Sandra Chapman, our women's editor and columnist; Louis Malcolm, the 'Roamer' columnist; sports editors the late George Ace, Brian Millar and Richard Mulligan. There was also the late highly esteemed Dan (D.C.K.) Kinney, editor of 'Rod and Gun' and night editor and leader writer for 15 years of my early career at the paper in the 1970s/1980s.

Interestingly, up until the late 1970s, Good Friday was a day we had an opportunity at the News Letter to increase our circulation, with our morning rivals the Irish News and the Dublin dailies not publishing on what they considered was a 'Holy Day'. We prepared for weeks on a bumper News Letter Good Friday edition and were rewarded with circulation figures as high as 100,000. In those years, the three Belfast daily newspapers operated within a several hundred yard radius of Donegall Street and Royal Avenue – the Telegraph were our main rivals, with the Irish News and ourselves having much more in common as morning newspapers, but not politically in our constitutional aspirations.

Being a traditional unionist newspaper, politics was given considerable space, with the paper fortunate in having Mervyn Pauley, one of the best political correspondents of his generation, with contacts across the Ulster political divide. The Morning View column was widely read as the accurate barometer of unionist thinking across party loyalties and for upwards of a decade and a half from 1993, I was actively involved with the editor of the day and others in writing these articles. News Letter proprietor Captain OWJ Henderson always insisted the News Letter was a unionist paper, not a Protestant paper.

The News Letter has always been a strict law and order newspaper and criminal and illegal violent activity was consistently denounced in the Morning View column. And when successive British governments were found to be untrustworthy, as occasionally they were, in failing to uphold Northern Ireland's integral place in the United Kingdom, our leader articles felt it necessary to call these machinations out as the work of 'Perfidious Albion'.

While organising the news desk was a big part of my job, writing remained my natural skill which meant I also managed to fit in big-read feature interview spreads with various public figures, politicians, church leaders and sports personalities. My style was always simple and direct – I wrote to inform, educate and entertain! Over my 50 years with the News Letter I worked under 11 editors, with all of whom I enjoyed a good relationship. The editors, all professionally equipped in their own individual ways with sound editorial acumen, were: Cowan Watson, Kenneth Withers, John Trew, Sam Butler, Geoff Martin, Nigel Waring, Austin Hunter, Darwin Templeton, Alistair Bushe, Rankin Armstrong, and Ben Lowry.

In the 1990s, the News Letter published from Boucher Crescent in south Belfast, and a decade on at Carn industrial estate in Craigavon.

Over the years, significant change for progress occurred when highly esteemed and talented female colleagues the late Helen Greenaway became our night editor; Ruth Rodgers was appointed as Farming Life editor and Helen McGurk as the News Letter features editor. Farming Life is a superb Wednesday/Saturday supplement which considerably boosts the News Letter's readership and significant advertising revenue streams, particularly in the Ulster rural farming community.

Ahoghill man Geoff Martin, editor in the 1980s/1990s, for more than a decade was a close working associate of mine, who inspiringly dispatched me to the United States in 1993 with a generous £2,000 expense package for a series of features on the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots) communities whose families emigrated in the 18th century and played a key role in the American psyche. My two highly memorable weeks in Tennessee produced a special July 4 News Letter anniversary brochure, which brought in £10,000 US advertising revenue bonus for the paper. The exhilarating experience that summer inspired me over the next 25 years to write 11 best-selling books, both in the US and at home, on the subject, the first being 'The Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee'. My American sojourn embraced more than 50 trans-Atlantic flights and covered tens of thousands of miles through 15 US states for exhaustive research and lecture work in cities and towns in inner backcountry United States.

Geoff Martin, it was, who also came up with the original idea of a Saturday church page and this has continued on my watch occupying my editorial demands every week until the present day.

My American country music column too has also been a constant slot in the News Letter, for 40 years, and it still enjoys a highly popular Friday publication space. Over the years, I have interviewed for the News Letter a galaxy of top American country stars – Garth Brooks (in Nashville and Belfast), Charley Pride (in Belfast and Nashville), Willie Nelson, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Crystal Gayle, George Hamilton IV, Connie Smith, Ricky Skaggs, Brenda Lee, Reba McEntire, Billy Walker, Whisperin' Bill Anderson and Alan Jackson. American country music has a huge following in Northern Ireland.

In retirement since 2008, I am privileged to continue contributing weekly to the pages of our much celebrated newspaper – one that remarkably has been on the news stands since September 1737 when the intrepid Francis Joy was in the editor's chair. For 287 years, the Belfast News Letter has held a cherished place in the annals of Ulster society; long may it continue to prosper and speak robustly in its columns in defence of the Union and on behalf of wider society in this part of the United Kingdom. Incredibly, my editorial span at the Belfast News Letter extends to close on 20% of the paper's unique and engaging lifespan.

l In 2010, Billy Kennedy received a CIPR Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to journalism. His authorship of 11 books on Scots-Irish migration history to America has been acknowledged by three US Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush