Ben Lowry: You are supporting the world’s oldest English language daily newspaper

A development last week, when an older German newspaper ceased daily publication, made me feel that, as editor of this paper, I should update readers on our history.

We are not, as some people think, the oldest newspaper – several ongoing titles were launched before our first edition in September 1737. But they are mostly weekly titles, we are the oldest surviving English language daily. For a while the News Letter was owned by the same company, Johnston Press, as the Stamford Mercury, a weekly that dates back to 1712 and is still going.

Of daily papers, we are at least a century older than most of them and are almost 50 years older even than The Times (of London), which began publication in 1785 as the Universal Daily Register. It was a daily paper from that first edition, whereas we were published twice a week until we became a daily in the 1800s. Thus, by one measurement – of papers that have always been dailies – The Times is the oldest.

So the most accurate way to describe our record is as follows:

Of English language newspapers in the world that now publish daily, the News Letter is the oldest

There were until recently four older dailies than us, but none publish in English. It was one of those titles, the German language Wiener Zeitung based in Vienna, that just ceased to be a daily. It will become web only. It was founded in 1703 but did not publish during World War II, so we were already in a rarer historical category of ‘continuously published’ papers (the News Letter has never been out of print).

The Gazzetta di Mantova in Italy was launched a staggering 359 years ago, in 1664. I just checked its website and can see images of all its front pages over the last week. And the German Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung (1705) and Hanauer Anzeiger (1725) still seem to be dailies. Russia has a paper that supposedly dates to 1703, the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, but it is a paper launched by the communists in 1918 that was rebranded in 1991 as the older title. Mention of St Petersburg reminds me that the first surviving copy of the Belfast News Letter (BNL), from October 1738, reports from the then Russian capital, where Empress Anna ordered Te Deum sung in the cathedral for defeat of the infidel (Muslims) in a Russo-Turkish war.

France’s oldest national paper, Le Figaro, only goes back to 1826, but a French daily in Switzerland, Feuille d'Avis de Neuchâtel, is just behind us (1738). China has 1,000+ year-old chronicles but its proper newspapers date to the 1800s.

Papers only got going two centuries after Gutenberg’s 1440 printing press. The BNL begins midway in the 580 years since the invention.

No American paper is as old as us. The Hartford Courant in Connecticut, is 1764. But America had papers before the BNL. The Boston Gazette was founded in 1719 by the brother of Benjamin Franklin, the US founding father whose death in 1790 was reported in the same edition of this paper as the death of our founder Francis Joy. The Boston News Letter was earlier, 1704, but folded in 1776, just before the Declaration of Independence of that year. The News Letter was not the first title in Europe to report the July 4 declaration, a charming myth that even we perpetuated until it was disproved in a 2012 history of the BNL by CDC Armstrong, commissioned for our 280th birthday. Our report of the declaration that fuelled the American revolution was printed in late August 1776, days after it reached London (news took weeks to cross the Atlantic). Yet we are one of the last surviving papers that reported the declaration. We are also a paper that has 1730s reports of early boats from Ulster to America carrying Scots Irish pioneers who helped build what would become the United States.

The News Letter was not unusual in the 1730s – there were many fledgling papers. Its survival is unusual. The Dublin News Letter of 1685 didn’t last, nor did the first ever daily, the Daily Courant of London in 1702, when the Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe was a journalist in that city. Our sister title the bi weekly Derry Journal, owned like us by NationalWorld, is another survivor: last year it hit 250 (1772).

I cannot do justice to our history in this space. Suffice to say that when I edited an ‘On This Day 275 Years Ago’ column in 2013/14, in which each day I reproduced news from exactly 275 years before (from our earliest surviving 1738/39 editions), and then again an ‘On This Day 280 Years Ago’ series in 2018/19, it was one of the highlights of my 27 years on papers. Not only was it a pleasure to compile the oldest ‘On This Day’ column ever in an English language paper (no other daily was old enough), it gave me insight into 1730s Ulster and the world (the papers were full of global news).

Professor (Lord) Paul Bew calls the later 1790s News Letter the most interesting newspaper in the world. “Because,” he wrote, “it covers the French Revolution in great detail, but more importantly it deals with the impact on Britain and Ireland. As Ireland is caught up in the clash between enlightenment ideals, national security and sectarianism there is no better guide than The Belfast News-Letter.”

Newspapers face the challenge of falling print sales. People under 50 expect their news for free. But we still have an army of readers, particularly for our bumper, 136-page weekend News Letter/Farming Life (Farming Life turns 60 this year). All for £2.20, less than the cost of a hot drink at those branded takeaway coffee houses where cars queue across NI. By buying us, you keep this historic title not merely alive but flourishing in the 21st century with print and digital editions. See below how you can subscribe and support our journalism.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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