Robin Esser was eight years old when he announced his ambition to be a journalist. “I wanted to edit my mother’s favourite newspaper, the Sunday Express,” he told Press Gazette in 2007. It took 40 years, but as he said: “I did it.” Once in the editor’s chair he found that events moved fast, not least within the industry. Esser was the last British newspaper editor to see his paper printed on Fleet Street, but in April 1989 he said farewell to the rumbustious world of clattering typewriters and steaming hot metal as the Express titles moved into clean and clinical corporate offices.
Esser had honed his craft in a world where reporters kept pennies in one pocket to ring in stories from a