The city of Dundee likes to think of itself as having been built on jute, jam and journalism. It was only in the 1850s, thanks to the Crimean War, and then the later American Civil War, that a long-established linen industry gave way to the rougher and tougher jute, to supply the sacking and carpet backing that expanding industry, military demand and growing consumption required. The jam is James Keiller's marmalade that dated from the end of the eighteenth century but had found a London market from the end of the 1830s. The journalism is a proliferation of daily and weekly papers that, in time, largely came into the hands of the still-thriving D. C. Thomson & Co. Of course, there were other industries. Linen manufacturing continued in the surrounding towns and villages. Shipbuilding thrived into the twentieth century and in the 1870s there were still at least a dozen whaling ships operating out of Dundee. By 1850 the population of the city was nearing 80,000, 19 per cent of whom were from Ireland.

Dundee's first newspaper was the Dundee Weekly Advertiser started in 1801, intended as a politically radical voice in the city and becoming the Dundee, Perth & Cupar Advertiser until 1861. In 1845 it had moved from a weekly to a bi-weekly and, although sympathetic to the Free Church and to free trade, it had by then lost most of its radical edge, and the editor Francis Willoughby Baxter ‘lacked the force and verve of his predecessors’. Ownership in 1850 was in the hands of the Saunders family, whose links with the paper dated back to its origin, but in 1851 the family sold to a syndicate that included the two local solicitors, James Patullo and William Neish. Francis Willoughby Baxter resigned the editorship when the new management took over. His first successor was another local solicitor, John Austin Cloag, but in 1851, 23-year-old John Leng from the Hull Advertiser was appointed first as reporter and sub-editor and then from 1856 as editor and then as one of the partners, alongside Pattullo and Neish. The layout and content of the paper immediately showed improvement, and it was the first main Scottish newspaper to use the occasional illustration produced by zincography.