With a population of over 70,000 in 1850, the city of Aberdeen was by far the largest settlement in Scotland's north-east corner. The railway arrived from the south in 1850 and new lines were moving out to the west and north, making the city even more important as the commercial hub of the area. The fishing industry was expanding, and in shipbuilding the city was noted for its wooden clippers. The separate universities of King's College and Marischal College attracted students from all over the North. In the second half of the 1840s the city supported four weekly papers – the Journal, the Herald, the Banner and the Constitutional – as well as various monthlies.

Aberdeen claims the Aberdeen Journal as the oldest Scottish newspaper, with a continuous existence to the present. It had been founded as a weekly in 1748 by James Chalmers and, in the 1850s, it was still in the hands of the Chalmers family. David Chalmers, the grandson of the founder, who had been in charge since 1810, handed over to his two sons, James and John, in 1854. He died in 1859. The paper remained Tory and, with an eye to its rural readership, defended the Corn Laws against the growing demand for free trade. John Ramsay, according to one account ‘a thick-set, dumpy little man, with keen, sharp visage, twinkling eyes, and humorous mouth, fond of disputation’, was editor or leader writer until about 1850, when William Forsyth, who had trained with the Inverness Courier, took over.

There had been a number of attempts to provide a Liberal alternative in the city, most successfully the Aberdeen Herald from August 1832 under its irascible editor, James Adam, whom Russel of the Scotsman regarded as ‘one of the ablest men ever connected with the newspaper press’. Although it is sometimes suggested that it was Adam who educated the North of Scotland in Liberalism, the problem with the Herald by 1850 was that it had no empathy with the Free Church, which all the Aberdeen ministers had joined in 1843, and even less sympathy with Liberal-radical causes such as temperance or total abstinence. Adam lashed with his pen evangelical reformers, temperance advocates, supporters of combining the city's two universities, and the dishonest.