After WW2 people turned increasingly to magazines, wireless and television, and large broadsheet newspapers - ideal for armchair reading or even hiding behind to avoid conversing with fellow train passengers - began to feel the competitive pinch. Amalgamation is often the precursor to annihilation and, though huge numbers of local titles have been lost across the country in the past half-century, the Mercury has survived. It bought out the Gazette in 1951 and for the past 70 years has been this area’s only paid-for local rag. James Dare took on William Frampton as a young reporter and then Frampton took on Dare’s daughter, a marriage which eventually gave the Frampton family ownership of the Mercury until sold in 1988 to Community Media Ltd which later became part of Archant.