Southport Visiter

About Southport Visiter

The Southport Visiter is a weekly paid-for newspaper serving Southport, the Victorian seaside resort on the Merseyside coast in north-west England. Founded in 1844, it is one of the oldest newspapers in the region, and its famously idiosyncratic spelling of "Visiter" with an "e" instead of an "o" has been a talking point for generations of readers. Now owned by Reach plc, the paper continues as a distinct printed product for the town even as its digital presence has been folded into the wider Reach network, and it remains the paper of record for Southport and its surrounding villages.

The first edition: May 1844

The very first issue of the Southport Visiter was published on Saturday, 4 May 1844, and cost just three pence. In those early days it appeared on Saturdays only and was, in essence, a list of the visitors then staying in the town. Southport was in its Victorian heyday as a fashionable resort, and the paper was first published by Robert Johnson, a printer and bookseller, with the stated aim of supplying "a correct list of visiters at all hotels, boarding establishments, and lodging houses". The first edition appeared just three years after the death of William "Duke" Sutton, the man regarded as the founder of Southport itself, placing the newspaper's birth at the very beginning of the town's rise as a resort.

Why "Visiter" is spelt with an "e"

No question has been asked of the paper's staff more often than why its name is apparently misspelt. The answer lies in its origins: in 1844 the word "visitor" was commonly spelt with an "e" instead of an "o", and through tradition the paper has kept the archaic spelling ever since. The paper's own history offers a charming alternative legend: that a young assistant, setting the type for the first edition, placed the wrong copper block in the forme and nobody noticed until it was too late, by which time the name had stuck. On April Fools' Day 2016 the paper published a hoax announcement that it would finally correct the spelling to "Visitor", complete with a new logo, before publishing a retraction and confirming that the historic spelling would continue.

Printed by hand on Columbian presses

The first Southport Visiter was produced by methods that seem scarcely believable today. The editions were printed on two hand-powered Columbian presses, inked with large hand rollers, at the paper's office at 115 Lord Street. Every letter and number was a separate copper block, and the pages were compiled block by block in painstaking work. It took six hours to print a run of 400 copies, with the office staff taking turns in "pulling" the paper from the press. The first copies sold out within hours, and the staff rushed back to the office to carry out further printing runs: a major new brand was born in a single Saturday.

Growth: twice weekly by 1860

The paper's popularity grew rapidly. By 1860 the Visiter was being published twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, reflecting the town's expanding population and the growing appetite for local news. The move from Lord Street to larger premises on Tulketh Street came in May 1889, when the paper needed more room for its presses, its growing staff and its advertising business. Branch offices were opened for the paper's sister titles, and the Visiter became the hub of a small publishing group serving the coastal towns of south-west Lancashire and north Merseyside.

A century on Tulketh Street

The paper's offices at 26-32 Tulketh Street in Southport town centre were its home from the 1890s until their closure in 2016, a span of well over a century. At its height the building housed dozens of journalists, photographers, printers, advertising executives and production staff. For part of 2010 the ground floor was occupied by Southport Library, which moved in temporarily while work on The Atkinson arts centre was taking place, following a successful campaign by the former Coronation Street star and librarian Jean Alexander. In 2014 it was announced that staff would move to a new "digital hub" back on Lord Street, the street where the newspaper had begun. By July 2018 the empty Tulketh Street premises had been vandalised and staff were based in Liverpool, and plans were later agreed to convert the historic building into twenty-six flats with three new commercial units on the ground floor.

Reach plc ownership and the Liverpool Echo merger

The Southport Visiter is now owned by Reach plc, Britain's largest commercial news publisher, through its Reach Regionals division, formerly known as Trinity Mirror. In 2018 it was announced that the paper's website would merge with that of the Liverpool Echo, Reach's flagship Merseyside title, while the distinct printed product would continue. The move reflected the economics of digital publishing, in which regional websites are consolidated onto shared platforms, even as the Visiter's print edition kept its own masthead, its own reporters and its own identity as Southport's paper.

The Midweek Visiter and sister titles

Alongside the paid-for weekly, the Visiter stable has included the Midweek Visiter, a free newspaper that began life under the name Grapevine before being renamed. The paper's reporters have also produced the Ormskirk and Skelmersdale Advertiser, and the Tulketh Street newsroom once produced a family of titles including the Crosby Herald, the Bootle Times and the Formby Times, with a team of ten reporters, two executive editors and a group editor. Long service has been a tradition of the Visiter, with many instances of sons following fathers and daughters following mothers into the paper, and some staff members recording fifty years of service.

Editor Andrew Brown and the digital turnaround

For much of the 2010s the paper was edited by Andrew Brown, who worked for Reach for twenty-three years and served nearly six years as editor of the Southport Visiter, the Midweek Visiter and the Ormskirk Advertiser. Under his editorship the Visiter's website became, by the paper's own account, the fastest-growing news website in the UK, and its Facebook page the fastest growing in the country, while the Southport Visiter and Midweek Visiter both won Newspaper of the Year titles at the North West Newspaper Awards. Brown left the paper in late 2019, moving on to co-present on Sandgrounder Radio, and editorial responsibility passed to Adrian Short, then editor of the Runcorn and Widnes Weekly News series, overseeing a three-person reporting team.

Circulation and the challenges of the 2010s

Like most paid-for weeklies, the Visiter saw its print circulation decline through the 2010s. The Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for January to December 2018 showed the paper selling 2,323 paid-for copies a week, a year-on-year fall of twenty-four per cent, and by 2023 the ABC figure stood at 912. In May 2019 the paper marked its 175th anniversary with a special souvenir edition, looking back over nearly two centuries of reporting on the town. The anniversary was a reminder of the paper's durability: it had survived the coming of the railways, two world wars, the decline of the great seaside resorts and the digital revolution.

The town the paper serves

Southport is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, in the historic county of Lancashire, about twenty miles north of Liverpool on the Irish Sea coast. Its people are known as "Sandgrounders", and the town remains, by some measures, the most valuable residential area in Merseyside. The Visiter's patch takes in the town centre with its famous Lord Street boulevard, the suburbs of Birkdale, Ainsdale and Churchtown, and the surrounding villages of West Lancashire. Its journalism covers the full range of weekly-paper life: Sefton Council, the courts, the town's schools and churches, Southport Football Club, and the events that fill the resort's calendar.

The Visiter's place in Southport today

More than 180 years after Robert Johnson printed his first list of visitors, the Southport Visiter continues to serve the town whose name it carries in its famously archaic spelling. It has been printed by hand press and by computer, published from Lord Street and Tulketh Street and Liverpool, and owned by Victorian proprietors and a modern media group. Through all of it, the paper has remained what it was on that first Saturday in May 1844: Southport's own newspaper, recording the life of the town week by week.

Visit the official website: southportvisiter.co.uk