The Europa Beacon
The Rock's morning paper since 1902. If it happened yesterday, it's on the Beacon's front page by six.
- Founded
- 1902
- Published
- Every morning except Sunday
- Circulation
- About 12,000 copies
- Staff
- 46, including 9 reporters
- Press
- The Beast, a 1956 rotary press
- Offices
- The old harbour customs hall
A short history
The first Europa Beacon was four pages long, printed in 1902 by a man who had spent twenty years keeping the lighthouse at the southern tip of the Rock. He named the paper after it and gave it the same job: show people where the rocks are. Through the war, when most of the town had been evacuated, it shrank to a single sheet for the people who stayed, and it never missed a morning.
The newsroom
The newsroom is one long room above the presses: twenty desks, a wall of clocks for five cities, and a pneumatic tube that rattles copy down to the printers. It's quiet until about nine at night. Then the phones start, the typewriters go, and at midnight the whole floor shakes when the presses roll.
The Beast
In the basement sits the Beast, a rotary press bought second-hand in 1956 and kept alive ever since with spare parts and stubbornness. It prints the whole run overnight. Nobody upstairs is allowed to call it a machine.
The front page
The front page is the Beacon's whole personality: one photograph, one headline, never more than five words. When something happens on the Rock that nobody can explain, it goes up there as a question.
Timeline
- 1902The first edition, four pages long.
- 1940A single-sheet war edition for the people who stayed.
- 1956The Beast arrives in the basement.
- 1974The Beacon wins its first press award.
- 1983The Beacon covers the 25th anniversary of Fusion Laboratories.
- 1985December. The front page asks a question nobody can answer.