A Talk given by Mark Sweetingham Editor of the ‘Romford Recorder’ on Thursday 24th November 2011
LOCAL LAD LEADS THE PRESS
M ark Sweetingham
is a local lad made good. Born and raised in Collier Row,
by a family with roots in Hampshire, he attended the North Havering Comprehen- sive school, then the largest Secondary School in Havering. As a scholar, academia did not call, and he was glad to leave school to do something practical. But he was interested in reading and in the local news. He was called to the press at the age of 13 by delivering copies of the ‘Romford Recorder‘ in his neighbourhood, and with his interest in reading and writing, a career in the press seemed something he could tackle and enjoy.
S
o Mark joined a training course for would-be reporters, and then applied
to be taken on as a trainee journalist, He quickly obtained a traineeship and thor- oughly enjoyed the work, working mostly in local papers, but later in his career he also had a stretch in the national press, in- cluding the now defunct ‘News of the World’ and the ‘Sunday Mirror’.
B
ut it was the, local press that really interested him, and from cub reporter
he progressed to becoming an editor, editing not only the ‘Romford Recorder’, but also the ‘Ilford Recorder’. Mark tried a stretch of general management, but found this lacked the drive of editing journalism – especially local journalism.
H
is longest post has been as editor of the ‘Romford Reporter, a paper which has been serving the Romford area
for 108 years. It is also a paper which has the largest paid circulation of any other local paper in Greater London with a weekly circulation of 25,000.
T
he ‘Recorder’ is now no longer an independent paper, being part of the
Eastern County Newspaper Group, centred on Norwich, but with local papers ranging from Devon to Scotland. It was this range of ownership that led the firm to change its name to ‘Archant’, which is not site specific. Archant is the biggest privately owned newspaper business in the UK, owning 80 papers and local magazines, such as ‘Essex Life’. With this wide ownership the company has been able to clearly enter the digital age, and, with the economies that this brings, is now a highly profitable organisation.
S
ummarising the last 100 years of newspaper history that has taken
place since the founding of the ‘Romford Recorder’, Mark sees the current period as one of great change, especially in the last 30 years, with the Murdoch Revolution that ended the old printing practices where the dominant power lay with the print un- ions. With rising costs and outdated tech- niques the printing industry- especially newspapers – would have gone under with the pressure of new technology and new competitors such as websites, Free Newspapers, Radio, and TV, all at the same time as there has been a dramatic decline in newspaper readership, so for example when Mark joined the ‘Romford Recorder’ his household took no fewer than 2 daily papers, 2 evening papers, the Recorder (a weekly paper) and a Sunday paper, which had declined to just 2 to 3 weekly papers by the early 21st century.
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