Over 119 years of serving community

COOKSTOWN brothers John and Henry Glasgow came up with the idea of publishing a weekly newspaper back in 1891.

At that time the pair were involved in the printing trade and ran a family seed merchant business at William Street in the town centre.

As Cookstown was the geographical centre of Ulster they aptly named their new publication The Mid-Ulster Mail. During the early years the 'Mid' as it became known, contained from four to eight pages.

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The printing was done on a hand-fed printing press and the newspaper was distributed throughout East Tyrone and South Derry.

In those days the paper was on sale on Friday's rather than Thursday's as today.

In the 1950's a printing press was purchased, enabling the size of the paper to be increased to 18 pages. Shortly afterwards the 'Mid' took what was then considered in newspaper circles, the very daring step of introducing front page news. Up until then the front page had been taken up by advertisements.

Despite reservations by some readers over the switch, the paper went ahead and published news stories on the front page in 1957.

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1975 saw another radical change. The introduction of modern typesetting equipment speeded up the page make-up process, making production more efficient. This preceded the launch of the paper in tabloid (Euro) form in 1978.

In November 1990 the 'Mid' was purchased by Morton Newspapers, Northern Ireland's largest weekly newspaper publisher.

And the paper has been recognised by its journalistic peers at the top of the profession - the Mid picked up the coveted IPR/BT Weekly Newspaper of the Year award in 1999.

More changes followed when Johnston Press bought over the Morton Newspapers group in 2006 - reducing the size of the paper to the universally recognised tabloid form towards the end of 2006.

The biggest change in recent months has in on-line journalism with a brand new website keeping readers up to date at www.midulstermail.co.uk.

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