Type Daily newspaper Editor David Whaley | Owner(s) Hirst Kidd and Rennie Founded 1854 | |
Headquarters Oldham
Greater Manchester
England Website www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk | ||
The Oldham Evening Chronicle is a daily newspaper published each weekday evening. It is a local newspaper which serves the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, in Greater Manchester, England. There are also four sister editions called the Oldham Extra, Saddleworth Extra, Tameside Extra and Dale Times published on the first Thursday of each month.
Contents
The paper is owned by Hirst, Kidd and Rennie Ltd.
History
On 6 May 1854, the first edition of the Oldham Chronicle (as it was originally known) was published by a bookseller and printer Daniel Evans in an effort to provide the then thriving cotton manufacturing town of Oldham with its own locally produced newspaper. Oldham was enjoying rapid economic expansion thanks to the Industrial Revolution, but local communities had to rely on Manchester papers for news about the town and surrounding districts. The Oldham Chronicle was published in an attempt to fill this gap. Five months later, he sold it to Robert Lewis Gerrie.
When Gerrie died 18 months later from consumption, Jonathan Hirst and Wallace Rennie bought the paper in 1857 for £800, and members of the Hirst family still work for the newspaper - the current Chairman is Philip Hirst, great great grandson of Jonathan Hirst.
The paper went from strength to strength and became an established and favoured paper for the wider Metropolitan Borough of Oldham.
Due to this increase in popularity, in 1880, it was decided to produce a daily edition (Monday to Saturday). The weekly edition and the Oldham Evening Chronicle were published together until 1982, when the paid-for Oldham Chronicle became the free Chronicle Weekend. In 2010, Chronicle Weekend was separated into two free monthly editions, the Oldham Extra and the Saddleworth Extra. In 2012 the Oldham Evening Chronicle produced the first 'EID' festival supplement which was aimed at the significant BME community in Oldham.
Most recently however the paper is generally regarded as being in massive decline, with a circulation of about 8000 out of a possible 224,897 people; most of its content is provided as what seem increasingly to be press releases from by Oldham Council, fund raising by various charities and individuals with little comment or and where all criticism of various local, "political personalities", and their policies (particularly OMBC's massively unpopular policies about waste collection) are largely ignored or even suppressed completely.
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