Bringing you the news year after year
The Skegness Standard was first published on Wednesday, July 5, 1922, from a premises in Lumley Road.
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A brief history of tourism
The Skegness area has been occupied since Roman times.
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Find out about the Fisherman
The Jolly Fisherman, with his sou'wester, gum boots and broad smile, has become synonymous with Skegness.
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Paddle boats and a pier to be proud of
Skegness’ most famous feature is undoubtedly its pier, which is one of only 50 remaining in the UK.
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Billy Butlin - funfairs and fame
William Heygate Colbourne Butlin was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 29th September 1899 to William, the son of a clergyman, and Bertha, the daughter of a small town baker who had become a travelling showman.
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Carry on camping
Billy Butlin, a travelling fairground worker from Canada, set up his first holiday camp at Skegness in 1936 having identified a need for all-weather recreation for holiday-makers.
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80 years of Skegness yesterdays
After the foreshore became the property of Skegness Urban District Council in 1922, the local authority quickly went ahead with developing it.
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Flying bombs and wartime rations
By 1939 the nation seemed to have almost recovered from the Wall Street disaster of 10 years earlier, and then Hitler marched into Poland and Europe was aflame again.
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The ups and downs of life in a grand old English seaside town
As at the end of the Great War 1914-18, the aftermath of the Second World War found Britain with a huge housing shortage and local authorities’ first priority was solving that crisis.
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Standard staff celebrating the 75th anniversary of the paper in 1997.

The Skegness Standard was first published on Wednesday, July 5, 1922, from a premises in Lumley Road.

Costing one penny, it contained eight pages and filled its front page with adverts.

It was an exciting time for Skegness as the urban district council bought most of the foreshore from the Earl of Scarbrough to develop it as a mecca of family amusements.

Skegness already had two local papers covering its events. But the Standard still managed to achieve sales of 1,208 in its first week.

More copies were sold than there were houses in the town, so it obviously had a wider appeal.

The first editor was Arthur Fletcher. His name was a byword for hard work. He was in charge of the advertising as well as the news.

And as an urban councillor, he provided long verbatim accounts of all their proceedings, including his own contributions to them.

In 1933 the paper was enlarged to 12 pages and advantage was taken of the extra space to give full coverage of Billy Butlin’s first carnival.

The shortage of newsprint during the war brought the paper down to a mere four pages.

It was 1954 before the restrictions were eased and we got back to eight pages.

At this time the small adverts on the front page were replaced with news.

Arthur Fletcher did not live to see it. He died, still working, in 1952.

Among the editors who followed him were Vivian Pearce, Maurice Pearson, who came from a London evening paper, and Jim Blake, who left in 1958 and died in 1965.

Ted Coleman edited the paper from 1959 to 1967, when he became news editor of the Lincolnshire Standard at Boston, later moving to the county council as public relations officer.

Norman Payne, a freelance journalist, took over from him for a short time before returning to his freelance work and died, a victim of cancer, in 1980.

Gordon Collins came from Peterborough in January, 1969, and edited the Skegness Standard for 16 years.

This period saw the change of publication date from Wednesday to Friday in 1977 and the change from broadsheet to tabloid in 1981.

The first change upset a lot of readers.

By now the Standard was situated at the corner of Algitha Road and Lumley Avenue — now Barclays Brokers — with an editor’s flat above.

There were two reporters and the typewritten copy was sent by rail to the printing works at Boston.

The advertising department occupied a separate room and it was here a teleprinter was installed as our first piece of technology alongside a somewhat erratic photo-copier.

A free paper was introduced in conjunction with the paid-for Standard, for which editorial and advertising staffs had to find fresh material.

The first was the Gazette. Later, in its place, came the Extra. More recently we had the Adscene.

Nowadays, of course, we have The Citizen - arguably the brightest of a pretty bright bunch of products.

The Standard’s circulation was extended to the villages around Skegness in the early 1980s, and the Skegness office also became responsible for the Spilsby edition.

Later Gordon Collins left to look aftrer the Mablethorpe and Alford editions which were being added to the series.

Nigel West, a former reporter, who had become a freelance journalist, took over at Skegness.

He handed the series editorship over to John Cowpe after two years.

Still the editor 16 years later, John Cowpe, started his journalistic career with the Standard. He moved into public relations at the county council, and then became Anglian Water’s Information Officer before returning to the Standard.

The Algitha Road offices expanded into the flat above.

Then, to find yet more space, the paper moved to three floors above a stationery shop owned by LSG — first Belton, then Stonebow Cards — in Lumley Road.

Computers were installed and news copy sent direct over a phone link to the production centre at Lincoln.

Adscene plc, based at Canterbury, took over Lincolnshire Standard Group Newspapers in the late 1980s, making us part of a country-wide chain.

When the paper moved to the new Hildreds shopping centre, we had a sophisticated computer system inter-linked with the production centre – then back at Boston – and all the other branch offices throughout the county.

When Adscene sold the Lincolnshire Standard Group, the Skegness Standard was briefly owned by Denitz and then by South News.

In June 2000 it was bought by the present owners, Johnston Press – currently fourth largest regional newspaper group in the country – and rapidly expanding.

Johnstons also bought the rival Lincolnshire Independent Newspapers, which owned the Skegness News.

They merged the two titles, striving to preserve the strengths of both. They also moved the publication day back to Wednesday!

The paper now uses all the latest tedchnology, including the internet. One of the latest exciting developments has been the setting up of its own website, www.skegnesstoday.co.uk

The Standard has always been an integral part of the community, promoting causes, providing a platform for widely differing views and, above all, offering an unrivalled information service in news and adverts for residents and visitors alike.