Times is at the heart of community

At that stage, the newspaper was the poor relation to the long-established Portadown News, and was read mainly by church people and the elderly.

But when the entrepreneurial Jim Morton bought it in 1956, to join his flagship Lurgan Mail, things really started buzzing, and the readers sat up and took notice.

His first editor was David Capper - later with the BBC - followed by Jim Irvine, and in the 1960s, Mortons introduced web offset printing, being the first news group in Ireland to print in full colour, and the circulation war in Portadown was on.

The Times overtook the News in the 1960s and continued to thrive under young editor David Armstrong who was at the helm for 40 years-plus until he retired.

He was succeeded by the present-day incumbent Alistair Bushe, who is leading the Portadown Times forward into the new age of technology.

In the early 1970s, such was the Times superiority in the circulation stakes that Mortons bought over the News and ran both papers (one midweek the other weekend) for a while before the Times finally became Portadown’s main newspaper.

The rest is history, with Jim Morton developing the company to today’s ‘stable’ of 22 newspapers, everywhere from Londonderry to Larne, Dungannon to Coleraine, with Scottish Radio Holding taking over from Jim’s son John, and then it went into the ownership of Johnston Press.

Along the way, the Portadown Times picked up a plethora of awards, ranging from lay-out to journalism, photography to advertising.

The Portadown Times also has an excellent presence on the internet at www.portadowntimes.co.uk.

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