THE WAKEFIELD DAILY ITEM BUILDING on Albion Street in 1919.
Tomorrow marks the Daily Item’s 130th anniversary. Thirteen decades is a long time to be in business. Especially this one.
Print journalism is dying and has been for a long time. Social media carries the day in a lot of places, and in some pockets where it doesn’t, corporations buy newspapers — both the big ones and the small ones — to make money, not really caring about the quality of their product or the people they serve.
In our opinion, what we do is worthwhile for a community we care deeply about. And it has been since 1894 when Fred W. Young and Laurie Young founded a daily four-column, four-page newspaper to compete with the weekly Citizen and Banner.
The new little daily struggled, but the late Harris M. Dolbeare, a reporter for the Citizen and Banner since the late 1880s, decided in 1900 that Wakefield could support a daily paper, and bought the daily; in six years it had grown in stature and prestige.
Eleven years later, in 1911, he purchased the weekly Citizen and Banner and consolidated it with the Wakefield Daily Item, the lasting publication in a line that dated back to the earliest newspaper, the Wakefield Banner (1868), Wakefield Evening Mail (1913-1915), and The Wakefield Independent (1934-1936).
During his 50 years as a newspaperman, 38 of which he devoted to the Daily Item, Mr. Dolbeare saw the commercial printing department, now known as the Item Press, grow into a complete commercial printing plant.
Some of Harris Dolbeare’s descendants work here today, and together we will do what we can to keep Wakefield from becoming part of the news desert spreading across our country.
Thank you for your continued reading.
