MNA Media

At least 28 newspapers have been published in Wolverhampton over the past century but the Express & Star remains the market leader.

Among those to be seen off were the Evening News, which closed in July 1915. During the First World War, the Express & Star raised its price to a penny due to the price of paper, with a promise to revert to a halfpenny when hostilities ended. By 1918, it had a staff of 100, including one delivery van and one driver.

The Graham family took a wider view of the newspaper industry, with Malcolm Graham – the current owner's late father – spending part of his twenties on newspapers in Canada, where he learnt from the slick "New World" style of journalism.

On his return, he applied to the Express & Star the more modern approach he had seen first hand.

By the 1930s, the circulation was more than 100,000 and the paper was part of a newspaper war which saw readers offered all manners of inducement to boost sales, such as tea-sets and holiday tokens.

During the Second World War, newsprint restrictions meant the size of the paper was reduced by half. In response to the shortage, the design moved from broadsheet to tabloid. A comforts fund organised by the paper raised £160,000 over the course of the war, while the paper also became the first to sponsor a Spitfire collection fund.

The post-war period saw the company compete with new innovations such as television yet still push up sales by an average of 1,120 a year.

Despite a national print dispute in 1959, the circulation rose to 201,594 copies a day.

Until 1963, the MNA published the Express & Star, Wolverhampton Chronicle plus the Saturday football paper, all set in a conventional hot metal composing room and printed on five letterpress machines.

In 1964, plans were made to hive off 19,000 copies of the Salop edition to create the Shropshire Star, published at a new photo-composed offset printing plant in Ketley.

The board saw an opportunity with the growth of Dawley New Town – later renamed Telford – and produced a successful news and advertising product to serve a county which is a mixture of agriculture and industrial areas.

Serving the largest inland county in the UK, both Shropshire Star and Shropshire Weekly Series cover all the major population centres within the circulation area.

Innovation continued during the 1970s, with the MNA introducing the first VDU system and adopting computerised accounting, as well as facsimile transmission.

In the 1980s the MNA paved the way for the computer revolution in the British newspaper industry and has remained in the forefront of publishing technology.

Both the Express & Star and the Shropshire Star are among the biggest selling regional newspapers in the UK.

The MNA continues to provide same-day news which is trusted by local communities.

With innovations in digital newspaper technology, it continues to be at the forefront of regional news almost 150 years after the Carnegie-Graham partnership.

In December 2012 Midland News Association also launched its own recruitment agency, Star Employment Services, which operates from the MNA’s headquarters in Queen Street, Wolverhampton.

In September 2023, it was announced that the Claverley Group had sold Midland News Association to National World PLC. The £11m sale included Press Computer Systems, which supplies publishing platforms for both MNA and other major publishers including Newsquest and DC Thomson. The sale marked Claverley Group's exit from regional newspaper publishing.[2]