Established in 1855 as the Military Chronicle and Naval Spectator, it relaunched as the Chatham News and Rochester, Strood, Brompton & Gillingham Advertiser on Saturday 9 July 1859.
The newspaper's offices moved from the centre of Chatham to Gillingham Business Park and were shared with the News's sister paper, the East Kent Gazette, which had been based on the same site in Sittingbourne since its foundation on 21 July 1855.
Previous reporters at the newspaper include Martin Brunt, now crime correspondent for Sky News, Peter Salmon, later controller of BBC One, Robert Tyrer, later associate editor of The Sunday Times, and John Williams, a political editor at The Daily Mirror and the London Evening Standard, and author of a draft of the September Dossier for war in Iraq.
Northcliffe announced closure of the News just a fortnight after a failed takeover by the rival Kent Messenger Group, which would have seen the KRNM titles subsumed into the KM portfolio.
Northcliffe had intended to cease publication a week earlier but the editor and staff asked to publish a farewell souvenir issue looking back over the News's 156 years.
[3] The first editor-proprietor of the News was Joseph Clayton, a bookseller, who soon discovered he needed a journalist, and brought in Henry Foster from The Spectator.
Hinks, a former editor of the Sheerness Times Guardian and East Kent Gazette, took the News and its sister paper the Chatham Standard through an era of great success and won many national newspaper awards.
His editorship, characterised by a string of exclusive stories and robust journalism, was marred by the closure of Chatham Dockyard in 1984, an event that caused huge social change, severe depression to the Medway towns' fortunes, and a drop in the circulation of the News.