The Shetland News
Photo from Shetland Museum and Archives.
The Shetland News was a weekly Shetland newspaper published between 1885 and 1963. The Shetland Newspaper Company Ltd., with J.K. Galloway, solicitor, as secretary, was established in 1885 to found and run The Shetland News, which was published in the Conservative interest. J.B. Laurence was engaged as Editor, Thomas Manson as works manager, and his brother James C. Manson as reporter. Thomas Manson had left his job as a printer with The Shetland Times in 1884 and established his own jobbing printer's business, the plant from which he sold to the The Shetland Newspaper Company Ltd. upon accepting his works manager position. The company also purchased the plant of the then recently closed down Orkney and Shetland Telegraph, and that of the defunct Shetland Advertiser to complete their equipment. Prior to joining the The Shetland Newspaper Company Ltd. as reporter, James C. Manson had also been employed as a printer with The Shetland Times, and is believed to have been the first person in Shetland to learn shorthand.
Unfortunately the Shetland Newspaper Company Ltd. was a very short lived venture, and went in to liquidation in 1886. Thomas Manson and James C. Manson then formed the company of T & J Manson and purchased the business. From 1886 until his death in 1907 James C. Manson was Editor and reporter of The Shetland News, thereafter Thomas Manson combined the Editorship with his other duties of works and business manager, his son, Thomas Mortimer Yule Manson subsequently followed his father in to the Editor's position. Following James C. Manson's death, the brothers' nephew, Robert F. Inkster became reporter for the paper.
Shetland News Online
On Thursday, 23rd November 1995, The Shetland News website was launched by Zetnews Ltd, using the name and the logo from the old printed publication. They were the first UK Internet-only, daily news service, and only the tenth such service in Europe. In 1999 the website closed down due to a lack of funds, but it was re-launched on 13th March 2003 as a joint venture between Graeme Storey (trading as Force 10) and editor Hans Marter and journalist Pete Bevington (trading as the Shetland News Agency).
On the 2nd of April 2007, The Shetland News launched their 'new-look' website.
By the end of 2010, The Shetland News website, with its archives, was occupying around 2.9 Gigabytes of storage space (with over 40,000 files in over 1,500 folders), and was generating web traffic of over 600 Gigabytes per month. To put some human figures to the story, during 2010 there were just over 2 million visitors to www.shetland-news.co.uk with over 206,000 visitors in December alone.
Website and Portal split
On 31st March 2011, the long term journalistic team of Marter and Bevington parted company with Storey and moved the Shetland News service to the new domain http://www.shetnews.co.uk
Storey still owns the original www.shetland-news.co.uk domain and now operates (as of 27 April 2011) a 'news portal' containing links to content published on other websites.
Storey also holds the copyright to the banner used at www.shetland-news.co.uk (a design itself a derivative of the original Shetland News banner). Both are shown at the top of this page.
The tagline "Great is the Truth and it shall prevail" is a translation of the Latin phrase "Magna Est Veritas Et Praelavebit" - a verse in the Book of Edras in the Latin Vulgate Bible.
