The company began publishing in Norwich in 1845 with Norfolk News, backed by Jacob Henry Tillet, Jeremiah Colman, John and Johnathan Copeman.

As the business grew it moved premises in 1902, 1959 and again in the late 1960s to its present headquarters location at Prospect House in the centre of Norwich.

The company moved into Internet publishing in 1996 when it launched Eastern Counties Network, a Web-based service using copy from its four daily newspapers as well as original material.

In April 1998, ECNG bought Home Counties Newspapers Holdings plc with an agreed bid of approximately £58 million.

In March 2002, ECNG changed its name to Archant, prompted by the company's broadening geographic scope and growing range of its activities.

In December 2003, Archant purchased 27 weekly newspapers from Independent News & Media in two separate deals worth up to £62 million.

The project, Local Recall, aims to bring 150 years of newspapers back to life through the latest technology; chatbots.

Archant, in partnership with local artificial intelligence leaders ubisend,[8] take on this two-year challenge to make their archived newspapers available via voice and text chatbots.

In a letter to staff, Archant said the decision had been taken due to "changes" in the newspaper industry and the move will provide "substantial cost savings".

In January 2020 Archant sold its headquarters, Prospect House, to regional insurance firm Alan Boswell Group.

[11] In July 2020, Archant announced it had put itself up for sale and was willing to plug a funding deficit exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic's disastrous impact on industry-wide advertising revenues.

[12] On 30 August it was announced that the operational units of Archant had been sold to private equity firm Rcapital Partners, (and the pension funds transferred to UK Government Pension Protection Fund); the holding companies were put into administration, making the existing shares worthless.