Edinburgh's neighbouring towns had not yet developed into suburbs of the city. Leith was a bustling industrial town with an extensive coastal trade to both sides of the Firth of Forth and beyond. Portobello had substantial pottery works and other industries, but with the arrival of the railway it gained acceptance as a summer retreat for the Edinburgh middle classes. As sea bathing gained in popularity, so did Portobello and, as Murray's Handbook for Travellers pompously opined, by the 1880s it had become ‘a second-rate watering place crowded in summer with bathing-machines, donkeys and trippers’.

Midlothian

The Leith Herald dated from 1846, produced by the enterprising publisher Charles Drummond, who in 1841 had brought out what has a claim to be the country's first commercial greetings card, declaring ‘A Guid New Year and Mony o’ Them’, two years before William Dobson's better-known Christmas card. In 1853 Drummond turned the monthly Leith Herald into a weekly. The business was up for sale in 1868 after his death and may have been run by his widow, since there was a threatened libel case against the proprietrix, unnamed, for publishing details of a divorce case. From 1868, however, the paper was edited and owned by Ebenezer Drummond, who got himself assaulted after writing a critical review of the Leith Choral Union's performance. In 1876 the business was bankrupt and the title was taken over by the firm of G. F. Steven. It continued under the control of Steven & Hope until 1911, when the paper closed.

The Burghs Reformer, owned and printed by William L. Rollo, appeared in 1859 and survived until 1863, when it was absorbed by the Leith Herald, which became the Leith Herald & Reformer. The focus of the Burghs Reformer was almost entirely local, advocating reform of municipal institutions. The Leith Advertiser appeared for less than a year from July 1864, issued by Andrew G. Henderson, another local printer. By early 1868 Henderson was bankrupt. This was followed in October 1868 by the Leith Burgh Observer, which stood for advanced Liberalism, but despite a change of name to the East Coast Gazette it was gone by the end of January 1869.