Horace N. Hastings

Imagine more than a century ago when there were no telephones, no motorcars and no electric lights or power; it was an era when the streets were illuminated by gas lamps andthe mode of transportation was horse-drawn carriages.Such were the conditions when a fledgling printer and Civil War veteran, Horace N. Hastings, and three of his four sons gave notice at the top of an editorial column on Saturday, December 8, 1877 that they officially had formed Hastings & Sons Publishing Company, a co-partnership, to publish “a daily newspaper of the caliber to meet the needs of the people and to aid in the progress and prosperity of (the) growing city” of Lynn, Massachusetts.

Hastings, a dynamic man with more richness of character than finances, had transformed his earlier weekly, the Lynn City Item, into the Daily Evening Item, one of several daily newspapers in Lynn at the time, which was a scant four pages each day and sold for a penny.

Such are the roots of today’s Itemlive.com website and The Daily Item community newspaper, still independent and family-owned 130+ years later by fifth generation descendants of the newspaper’s patriarch.

“So much has changed within our industry and so many community life cycles have passed that it’s an amazing thing to have our website today report the news from roots going all the way back to wooden, hand-laid type,” says Peter Hastings Gamage, company president and publisher today.

“Itemlive.com is an exciting and on-going commitment that’s only getting better. When you have the Greater Lynn community – and beyond – viewing more than a million pages of our news content each month, and tens of thousands of visitors and bloggers interacting on numerous stories and issues, it’s a very strong foothold to keep pushing our mission forward,” according to Gamage.

“We welcome all of you,” Gamage continued, “and encourage you to use our updated e-mail directories to send us your local news, events and photos and participate in such things as our interactive opinion polls, Letters to the Editor or Community Calendar event postings. It’s important that different communities of people communicate with and about one another and we want to continue to provide Greater Lynn’s forum to do that; just as we have since 1877.”

Welcome to Itemlive!