OTAGO "WITNESS"
.Press. Assn.-
well known weekly to cease publication ^ on june 30
-By Telegraph—- «y»pyrlgnt).
DUNEDIN, Tuesday: The "Otago Witness," which was established in 1851, ceases publication on June 30. , , v , The "Otago Witness" is only three years younger than the province .of Otago itself. Dunedin's founders determined that the town should duplicate Edinburgh in as many things as possible, and so the streets were named after those in Auld Reekie. It was quite natural, also, that the first newspaper should be called after Edinburgh's famous sheet, the "Witness," so closely connected with the name of the great Hugh Miller. The "Otago Witness" was started in February, 1851, and began life as a small sheet of four four— coloumn pages, but in a very short while it numbered eight pages, and a wood-bloek engraver was added to the staff to make the week-' ly illustration that adorned the front page. The first editor was Mr. W. H. Cutten, and the owners were a number of Dunedin business men, who ran the paper by a "committee of management." That sort of management is seldom a success in running a newspaper, and it was not long before the "Witness" hecame the property of Mr. Cutten. In 1861/ when the goldfields broke out, Mr. Cutten was joined hy Mr. Julius Vogel, and one result of the partnership was the starting of the "Otago Daily Times," the fii'st daily paper published in New Zealand. The editing of the "Witness" was successively in the hands of Mr H. W. Robinson, Mr. George Bell, and Mr. Robertson. The last-mentioned met his death in a big fire in Ross' building, the Oetagon, in September, 1879, and then the editor's chair was filled hy Mr. William Fenwick, who occupied it for a number of years. Later the business was turned into. a company. It is inevitable that the improvement of means of communication should oust the weekly paper from the position it filled ih the eafl'y days of settlement, but the country people of Otago will very much rejr gret the demise of their old friend, with which so many of them ha| grown up. M
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/RMPOST19320622.2.45
Bibliographic details
Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 257, 22 June 1932, Page 5
Word Count
359OTAGO "WITNESS" Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 257, 22 June 1932, Page 5
Using This Item
NZME is the copyright owner for the Rotorua Morning Post. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of NZME. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in