29 November: Newspaper Day

Today is Newspaper Day because on this date in 1814 The London Times was the first newspaper to be printed by a steam-operated press. Here are some facts about newspapers.

1. The first newspapers were daily bulletins of announcements called Acta Diurna, ordered by Julius Caesar in about 59 BC. However, they weren't papers, as such - they were carved in stone or metal and displayed in public places for people to read. Later on, it was the Chinese who first printed news on Paper to be circulated among court officials.
2. The first newspaper in Britain was the Courant, first printed in 1621. However, it was 1702 before Britain got a daily newspaper - The Daily Courant.
3. Today, there are about 24 billion newspapers published around the world every year. They all have one thing in common - all their Bar codes start with the digits 977.
4. The Times may have the most famous Crossword, but The Times wasn't the first paper to publish one. The Sunday Express beat them to it by several years, on 2 November 1924.
5. Famous people who used to work on newspapers include Charles Dickens (editor of the Daily News), Michael Foot (editor of the Tribune) and Winston Churchill (war correspondent for the Morning Post).
6. The word Gazette, a common newspaper title, comes from the "Notizie Scritte" (written notices) which was published in Venice every month from 1556. The price of it was one gazetta, a Venetian coin.
7. The daily newspaper with the largest circulation, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was a Soviet newspaper called Trud, which in 1990 had a circulation of over 21 million. Today, in the UK the newspaper with the biggest circulation is The Sun at about 3.24 million.
8. The first comic strip to appear in a newspaper was The Yellow Kid, a bald and barefoot little boy whose real name was Mickey Dugan, who wore a Yellow nightshirt which was too big for him. He first appeared in the New York World in 1895. It is from him that we get the term "yellow journalism" which is the publication of sensational stories with little fact checking, for the sake of selling papers.
9. In the UK, the longest running newspaper comic strip is Rupert the Bear, which first appeared in the Daily Express in November 1920, and is still going strong nearly 100 years later.
10. 70-80% of the revenue of the average newspaper comes from advertising. You could argue that the news stories and other content is only there to attract people to the adverts!

Golden Thread

Terry Kennedy is inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the small town of Fiveswood as a place to live and work after university. He is sure he has never visited the town before, but when he arrives there, it seems oddly familiar.

Fiveswood has a rich and intriguing history. Local legends speak of giants, angels, wolves, a local Robin Hood, but most of all, a knight in golden armour. Fiveswood's history also has a dark side - mysterious deaths blamed on the plague, a ghostly black panther, and a landslide which buried the smugglers' caves.

Terry buys an apartment in The Heights, a house which has been empty for decades, since the previous owner disappeared. Now he has finally been declared dead, developers have moved in and turned it into six flats. Terry has the odd feeling he has lived in this enigmatic house before. But that is not all. Since childhood, Terry has had recurring, disturbing dreams which have been increasing in frequency so that now, he has them almost every night. To his dismay, the people from his nightmares are his new neighbours.

Except, that is, for Eleanor Millbrook. She is refreshingly unfamiliar. After Terry saves her from a mysterious attacker, they become close. However, Terry's nightmares encroach more and more on his waking life, until they lead him to a devastating discovery about who he really is.

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