The Loughborough Echo started life as a freesheet of four broadsheet pages and became a paid-for 18 years later, with a cover price of a halfpenny.
In 1919, a man who was to play a major part in the Echo's success story, Charles Harriss, joined the paper as a reporter on being demobbed from the Army.
In 1977, Charles Harriss retired and John Rippin, who had joined the paper in 1955 as a trainee reporter, became the third editor.
Within a few weeks, news replaced most of the adverts on the front page, and nearly seven years later the switch was made to tabloid.
Over the years the Echo has won a number of newspaper industry awards, and in 1997 was voted the best paid-for weekly in the whole of the Midlands and East Anglia.