Introduction

This prescient comment from the heart of provincial news production in the 1970s goes to the core of the development of this sector of the newspaper industry in what might be termed a ‘long’ twentieth century. This era, from around 1880 to 2008, is dominated by the rise and fall of the evening regional newspaper in particular as a profit-making product. It has two key themes; firstly, the unrelenting move to corporatised, centralised ownership, which was established in the first half of this period. It is this which facilitated and dictated the pattern and impact of the second theme, the shift to computerised production, which dominates the latter part. The former gained traction more than 100 years ago and shaped the management, content and, to a degree, the normative expectations of what these titles should be. This structure, in turn, enabled a managerial approach to the introduction of new technology, seen as a way to cut costs and disempower the print unions. Most recently this corporate model has shaped the response to the decline of newspaper advertising profits as one of the imminent death of the regional newspaper in a post-digital era.

By the time the 1971 report was written, like the majority of newspapers in the UK, Cardiff's two daily titles, the Western Mail and the South Wales Echo had essentially been amalgamated. Along with a number of weekly titles, the dailies were in one publishing centre owned by Canadian newspaper magnate Roy Thomson. Thomson famously claimed to own newspapers only for their profit-making potential (Williams 2010: 188). The form of ownership which he epitomised was established as the norm during the latter half of the twentieth century and represented a race to ownership by various companies for whom newspapers were just one way of many of making money.