A distiguished national newspaper editor has recalled his days in local journalism in Liverpool covering dog shows and Rotary Club speeches.

Peter Preston, who edited The Guardian from 1975 until 1995, has penned an article for Local Newspaper Week in which he looks back to his times on the Daily Post and Echo.

“I started in journalism, long ago, doing school holiday shifts on my local paper, writing my first features about life at the university just up the road,” he writes.

“When I went to university myself I did every job going on the twice-weekly student paper there – and then learned my trade on Liverpool’s big evening and morning papers.

“I did funerals, Rotary Club speeches, dog shows, council rows and rugby matches. And at the end of that stint, when I moved on to cover local politics for the Guardian, I think I’d learned something precious.

“That politics doesn’t exist in some rarefied world at Westminster. That democracy lives, breathes and reacts in the minds and the lives of the people you catch a bus to work with every morning. That the local dimension isn’t some remote step ladder on the route to the top. It’s where everything begins. It’s the foundation stone of society.”

In his article Peter goes on to predict that newspapers will survive in some form as long as there are local communities.

“There’s been a local press in Britain for as long as there have been newspapers. There will be newspapers – in one form or another – for as long as people care about what happens around them,” he writes.

The piece can be read in full on the Newspaper Society website.

The NS has also published a round-up of how local and regional newspapers across the country marked the annual event. This can be read here.