Newspapers are still warhorses. But their owners are riding them to the grave

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 today’s situation is confounding as much as it is tragic

The 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 loyal readers served by gifted writers, of whom Cameron was one. Its circulation wasn’t what it had been – neither, come to that, was its radicalism – but it was still selling more than 1.1m copies a day. If it couldn’t survive, Cameron wondered, then what newspaper could, “outside the great chain-stores of the trade?”

The Chronicle’s owners, the Cadbury family, who were Quakers, had sold it to one of those great chain stores, the Daily Mail, 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 go now? “The creeping block-ownership of the industry still leaves them some choice – but not much, and not for long.”