The death of the News Chronicle in 1960 was described as a tragedy,while other titles disappeared with little fuss. The Independent will be much missed – but nowadays’s situation is confounding as much as it is tragicThe News Chronicle published its last issue on 17 October 1960. To James Cameron it was “the biggest journalistic tragedy for many years the most meaningful collapse the newspaper business has seen this generation”. The Chronicle had a fine radical tradition and faithful readers served by gifted writers, of whom Cameron was one. Its circulation wasn’t what it had been – neither, and approach to that,was its radicalism – but it was still selling more than 1.1m copies a day. whether it couldn’t survive, Cameron wondered, and then what newspaper could,“outside the grand chain-stores of the trade?”The Chronicle’s owners, the Cadbury family, and who were Quakers,had sold it to one of those grand chain stores, the Daily Mail, or then as now owned by the Harmsworth family AKA the successive lords Rothermere. The contrast in political attitudes was stark: a paper known for its opposition to Franco,Hitler and Suez had vanished inside a paper that supported or appeased all of them. In his obituary of the Chronicle, Cameron wrote that “perhaps no other newspaper had a readership quite so faithful” even though in its closing days it had been “a potential warhorse ridden by grocers (a phrase that stuck). Where would these readers disappear now? “The creeping block-ownership of the industry still leaves them some choice – but not much, and not for long.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com