The Canberra Times at 95: keeping track of the capital's pulse, from struggles to triumphs

The Canberra Times has been doing that for 95 years now. It has grown from a weekly broadsheet, published in a newly established city with more workers living in tents than people living in houses, to an outfit that today produces a daily newspaper alongside a website and app, email newsletters, podcasts and videos. In those 95 years - under various owners and editors - almost everything has changed.

Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare, an experienced country newspaper proprietor, was there the day in March 1913 the name of Australia's new capital was declared. He returned to his family in Sydney and told them of his plan. The Shakespeares would establish a newspaper for the new city, with a local focus and a national outlook.

T.M. Shakespeare was at plenty of firsts in Canberra in his lifetime. He was at the first auction of commercial land in the city, buying the site for a newspaper office at the corner of Mort and Cooyong Streets in December 1924. The Federal Capital Press of Australia Ltd, the company responsible for the paper, was registered in Sydney in 1925.

On Friday, September 3, 1926, the first issue of The Canberra Times was published. It sold 1800 copies, and announced it was printed on British newsprint, the same quality as The Times of London. "The establishment of The Canberra Times has been fraught with difficulties not usually faced in launching a newspaper, and which are largely due to conditions peculiar to Canberra. New ground had to be broken in every direction," the new paper said.

With front page news, clear type and plentiful illustrations, the first issue of The Canberra Times was a bold statement. (The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, ran classified advertisements on its front page until 1944.) From day one, the paper was a staunch advocate for the federal capital and the rights of its citizens - a tradition that continues. But the city was not bold enough to keep up. Canberra's development slowed dramatically during the Depression, so by the time The Times began appearing daily, from February 1928, the press could run off 10,000 copies a day for a city of 6500 people.

But T.M. Shakespeare's guiding principles were always clear, summed up in the stanza (adapted from a poem by George Linnaeus Banks) which appeared above the editorial column for 26 years after he died in 1938:

For the cause that lacks assistance

'Gainst the wrongs that need resistance

For the future in the distance,

And the good that we can do.

In a city often likened to a big country town, The Canberra Times has always sat in an unusual space between the local and the global. John Pringle, who was appointed managing editor of The Times in 1964, said the key to the paper was local news. "The main advice was never neglect local news. ... Any paper that is based in a city, you cannot neglect the local news because that is what the people are interested in," Pringle said.

The paper has never made any apologies for dedicating plenty of column inches to the issues of trees, foot paths, potholes and bin collections. Big local stories with bite, too: the incident of the painted frost-bitten grass at Bruce Stadium in 2000 or the tragedy of the Mr Fluffy legacy. Those stories often jostle for front page space against national and international stories. On the day The Times reported Nelson Mandela's release from a South African prison in February 1990, readers were told in a nearby paragraph the ACT government would crack down on unpaid parking fines. The opening of Lake Burley Griffin was reported in 1964 next to a splash on Nikita Khrushchev's removal from power in the USSR.

Of course, some moments in history trump all local coverage. In November 1963, a taxi driver happened to ask David Bowman, the then editor of The Times, for news of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas. The news reached Canberra just after 4.30 on Saturday morning, forcing Bowman and chief subeditor Frank Hamilton to call back the printers, who were in the bindery playing their ritual Friday night poker game. The Canberra Times was the only Australian newspaper to have the story that morning.

Remaking an edition late at night is no longer the way The Times breaks a story. The first thought would be to get a few paragraphs on the website, pushing notifications to the inboxes of subscribers and readers of the app. In real time, The Times would build its story. And a reporter carries the tools to do this almost everywhere.

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While a reporter's desk is no longer taken up with the wide carriage of an Olivetti typewriter and research is done digitally rather than in clippings files (thankfully the office ashtrays are long gone too), the task is the same: telling the city's story.

I wonder what the Shakespeares would have made of an empty newsroom this week. For most of last year, The Canberra Times was assembled remotely. Reporters packed up their desks in mid-March 2020 as the threat of coronavirus spread. Staff returned to the newsroom in November, but knew the drill when Canberra went into lockdown last month. Stories are typed in each day on kitchen tables and from spare rooms; reporters work the phones while pacing their own homes. It is a strange way to produce a newspaper - a great collaborative art, normally achieved with personality and style in the company of others - but it does show something of our dedication.

Almost everything about The Times has changed in the past 95 years: the fonts, the printing, the size of the paper, the way most people read it, the owners, the building. But then, so too has Canberra changed. What remains is the paper's essential commitment - however it might be achieved - to serve the national city and through it the nation.