Ben Lowry: ​The joy of reading early editions of Belfast News Letters, the world's oldest English language daily newspaper, can now be done from home

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on the Trump-Musk spat)

​There are older weekly papers and a handful of older foreign language ones but no English daily is as old as us.

This week the earliest surviving editions of this title were made accessible in digital format.

They have long been available to see in physical form in institutions like Belfast’s Linen Hall library and Central Library, as well as in the British Library in London. Now you can view them from home.

The week before last it was announced by the UK government that the "digitisation" project had made available on screen copies of the paper from the 18th to 20th centuries online that had been scanned.

The archive is available online via the websites British Newspaper Archive and Findmypast (but requires a paid-for subscription to view them – though the option of a week-long free trial is also available at the latter site). They can also be viewed for free in person at the British Library, or at any library which has a subscription.

This is an exciting moment for me, not only because I edit a title with such a long history (founded 1737) but because I have serialised the very earliest surviving Belfast News Letters (the earliest of all is pictured above). The oldest such copies are from 1738 and 39.

A few points that I would make about such papers.

First, if you look at the paper above it seems very different to papers today, and it is. The most obvious difference is the lack of a photograph, let alone a colour photograph. This of course is because the News Letter was founded a century before there were any photographs, and 150 years before they started to appear in newspapers on a regular basis. But if you then look more carefully, the newspapers today still follow some of the patterns of the 1730s: there is a big mast head at the front, with date, and then stories are set out in order. We do so in a much more exciting and colourful way today than we did then, but the basic format is intact – stories set out in order explaining in typed print what is happening in the world.

I marvel at the fact that this method has remained popular with readers for 300 years, past the invention of cinema, then radio, then television, and now the internet.

There is no doubt that the latter has posed the biggest threat of all to traditional newspapers, but even so there is still a huge appetite for printed newspapers. Look how many titles are sold in Northern Ireland shops each day. We have a particularly healthy newspaper culture here, with local weekly papers, three regional NI-wide daily papers, southern Irish papers, Scottish papers like the Daily Record, and national London-based daily papers. There are even people in the UK who still manage to get hold of physical copies of the huge, multi-section Sunday edition of the New York Times (one of the most stunning, comprehensive papers in the history of the industry).

And technology, for all its wonders, cannot yet replicate some aspects of physical newspaper-reading: for example sitting on a sofa, and opening up a newspaper with multiple stories across two pages, and letting your eye scan round the stories and pictures so that you can decide, in less than five seconds, what you want to read.

Another thing about the early newspapers is a point that I made this week on BBC Radio Four programme ‘The World Tonight’ (which was among the media outlets including the Guardian newspaper that was interested in our new digitised early News Letters): I have given many dignitaries and other people copies of our earliest surviving paper from 1738, and often they smile and say thank you and take it away, but I rarely get feedback from such recipients saying they enjoyed it. My theory is that they look at the paper, and all its condensed text, and think it is too severe, and a grim reminder of a time in which there was terrible poverty and harsh punishments such as hanging. And so, on some level, they don’t really want to dwell on it.

In fact the papers are full of fun and gossip and salacious titbits, as well as serious global and local news. There are indeed horrifying reports on things like public hangings (the odd mass hanging indeed), and that very first surviving paper from October 1738 has a report on the father of the ‘noted Turpin’ having in his possession a stolen horse, for which Dick was later hanged. But the whole world, literally and metaphorically, is in those papers.

They are a joy to read. They reflect human life on the planet, and I hope many more people will now access them.

Incidentally, digital subscriptions to the News Letter are now a mere £6.99. Click here for a link to how you can support our journalism.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor