After 118 years its farewell to the broadsheet
The changing face of the Meath Chronicle over the decades.
As our last issue as a broadsheet newspaper was published on Tuesday 3rd March, we thought it opportune to take a look back at how the Chronicle has changed and evolved through the decades. The Meath Chronicle has been a broadsheet since its foundation in Kells in 1897 by brothers, Tom and Michael Daly. In those days, it was published and printed in Newmarket Street, Kells, consisted of eight pages and came out on a Saturday morning.
It sold about 2,200 copies per week and often only featured advertisements on the front page, with news being relegated to the inside pages! In an era when the widespread use of electricity was still many years off, the newspaper was produced on a printing press powered by gas from the gas works at Maudlin Street, in a premises lit by paraffin oil lamps hanging from the ceiling by cords. By 1907, the Chronicle was being printed on a contract basis at Market Square in Navan by James Davis who had established a successful printing and bookbinding business on the site where the Irish Peasant newspaper was once located.
In 1917, he purchased the newspaper title outright following the deaths of the Daly brothers. For its time, the Chronicle printing works was equipped with some of the most up-to-date machinery available and the Chronicle quickly developed into the leading newspaper in the country with an ever growing circulation throughout Meath.
Photographs appearing in the Chronicle were a rarity up until the 1950s but from then on, they became a more common sight, illustrating both news and sports stories. The black and white era of newspaper production gave way to full colour in the late 1970s and the Meath Chronicle was one of the first newspapers in Britain and Ireland to regularly have colour photos appearing on its pages.
In 1978 a major development plan was put in place to invest in a new printing press and pre-press system that would allow for the printing of full colour photos on the front and back pages of the paper. A new office block was also constructed to house reporting and sales staff. The result of all this was a bigger and brighter newspaper which proved popular with readers and advertisers alike. Further technological developments in the 1990s saw the paper able to increase a number of colour pages it produced and the paper underwent a number of redesigns to enhance its presentation of stories and photographs.
The construction of a new state-of-the-art printing plant at Mullaghboy on the outskirts of Navan in 2001 finally allowed colour photographs to be printed on every page of the paper as the Chronicle continued to grow in size. In all that time and amidst all the changes that have occurred over the course of 118 years, the one constant was the broadsheet shape.
From Tuesday (10th March) onwards, the broadsheet will finally change to the more convenient and reader-friendly compact format aimed at delivering stronger visual presentation of both editorial and advertising content.
Compact in size BIG on impact