Today we continue our series celebrating Local Newspaper Week by looking at the history of the Telegraph & Argus which spans over 100 years and the changes that new technology has brought. Mike Priestley reports.

THE T&A has a long family tree which stretches back to 1834.

On February 6 of that year, William Byles first published the Bradford Observer from premises in Exchange Street, Piccadilly. It was a weekly newspaper costing 7d (just under 3p), of which 4d was stamp duty.

The Bradford Observer jogged along nicely for more than three decades, having the field to itself. But then, in 1868, it had to make an abrupt change from weekly to daily to meet the challenge from an upstart. The Bradford Daily Telegraph had arrived on the scene, launched by a Scot called Thomas Shields.

By coincidence, Shields came here via North and South Shields, where he had successfully launched two local newspapers. His search for new challenges brought him to Bradford, towing behind him his own small staff of journalists and compositors, many of them fellow Scots. Among them was the 27-year-old William McKinlay, the first editor of the Bradford Daily Telegraph when it began publishing from cramped premises in Bond Street.

The launch of Bradford's first-ever daily newspaper created a sensation. Crowds pressed around the windows of the print works to watch the first, four-page edition come off the rather basic press. At a halfpenny a copy (pre-decimal money, of course), it sold like hot cakes. Six months later the Bradford Observer went daily at twice that price.

By the end of its first year the Bradford Daily Telegraph had notched up daily sales of 6,500 and made £1,000 profit. By 1885 it was selling 22,000 copies a day - a very healthy number considering that a fair proportion of the population would be illiterate at that time.

Thomas Shields died in 1887 and is buried in Undercliffe Cemetery. His will included a £200 bequest to his printing manager, Jasper Patterson, who had an odd way of showing his gratitude. Five years after its founder's death (and 16 years after it moved from Bridge Street to Market Street), the Bradford Daily Telegraph acquired a rival.

The Bradford Daily Argus was launched in 1892 by the very same Jasper Patterson, who had been persuaded to take the plunge by a group of leading Conservatives in Bradford. They wanted some opposition to the "orthodox liberal" policies of the Telegraph, which leaned towards a working-class readership.

There was room for competing newspapers in Bradford, and it wasn't until 1926 that the two merged to become the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. The previous year had seen a final change of location for what had become Bradford and District Newspaper Co Ltd - the parent company of the Bradford Daily Telegraph, the Yorkshire Observer (acquired as the Bradford Observer in 1909) and the Yorkshire Sports (which was launched in 1900). The newspapers moved into splendid premises in Hall Ings which had previously been the wool warehouse of Milligan, Forbes and Co. - probably the most ornate wool warehouse ever built. The building virtually had to be gutted, with the work being done by J.& P. Obank, of Idle. The press was installed in the basement and printed the company's various titles until 1981, when the new Press Hall was built alongside, on a car park which had once been the site of the Bradford Court House.

Much had happened in the meantime. The Telegraph & Argus had dropped Bradford from its title (1947). The Yorkshire Observer had closed (1956). The Target (1979) and the Bradford Star (1981) had been launched.

And in the year the new press hall opened, the 81-year-old Yorkshire Sports ceased publication. Given competition from television and local radio, not enough people wanted to buy it any more. It simply wasn't economical. But that was then.

Technology and working methods have moved on in the almost two decades since, making it once again economical to produce the Yorkshire Sports. It was relaunched in the summer of 1997 and is doing very nicely, thank you. The name of the Yorkshire Observer also lives on, as the title of our community news section. And there are new names, too: The Business is our recently-launched, pink Monday supplement which focuses on industry and commerce. And Asian Eye is our new newspaper serving Bradford's fast-growing Asian population (and also proving popular with many non-Asians).

And so the family - which also includes the Keighley News, Craven Herald, Ilkley Gazette and Wharfedale and Airedale Observer - continues to thrive and to serve the local community as it has done for the past 165 years.

All change at the T&A

Once upon a time, in days of not really all that long ago, the production of the T&A involved a combination of manual, mechanical and industrial processes. It was a world which had a language all its own.

The Newsroom, where the reporters wrote their stories, would be noisy with the clatter of typewriters. The "copy" they produced would be passed over to the sub-editors who would check the story for mistakes, rewrite and improve it if necessary, decide where it should go on the page, write a headline and all the typesetting instructions and send it to the Composing Room.

There, the words on paper would be converted into hot-metal type by compositors sitting at Linotype machines, the type would be carried over to the "stone" (by that time rows of heavy metal benches, but in early printing days literally a stone-topped table) and the page would be assembled inside a metal frame known as a "forme".

Once each forme had been locked securely with special keys so the type stayed tightly in place, it would be taken to the Stereotype department (very, very rarely the thing would disintegrate into a thousand separate lines of type, amid much cursing). In "Stereo" an impression of the page would be made on a stiff card known as a "flong" before being converted with the help of more hot metal into the weighty, semi-circular plates from which the T&A was finally printed.

Then came computers, and a radical change swept through the world of newspaper production. Now, reporters write their stories on computer keyboards. The sub-editors - who have also taken over the type-setting role - design the pages on screen and slot the stories directly into them electronically along with pictures either scanned in from negatives or transferred from digital cameras. Advertisements previously input into the computer are "called in" to the page.

And once the process is swiftly, cleanly and quietly accomplished, the page is transformed into a negative from which a litho plate is produced, to go directly on to the web-offset printing press - which is now, of course, no longer the press which was tucked away in the basement of the former wool warehouse but a mighty Goss machine proudly on display in the glass-fronted press hall.

When the Bradford Daily Telegraph was launched, it was printed on a Wharfedale two-feeder, flat-bed printing machine. The sheets of paper were fed into it by hand. It was functional rather than fast. In 1871, with the move to Bridge Street, a Hoe machine was acquired which could turn out 8,000 copies an hour.

That output increased to 22,000 copies an hour with the move to Market Street in 1916 and the acquisition of a Victory machine. But these were thin newspapers and entirely in black and white.

The Goss press which is put through its paces day and night in Hall Ings now can turn out between 40,000 and 50,000 copies an hour - up to 96 pages thick and with full colour on 32 of them.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.