TODAY is a special day in Examiner history - the very last appearance of our paper in her old broadsheet format.
It is a tried and trusted formula that has worked for 153 years, through the reigns of six sovereigns from Queen Victoria to Queen Elizabeth II and what stories we have covered in that time!
Just to measure by the usual big milestones of history, the wars, is to realise anew the extent of that journey - the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale in the 1850s, the US Civil War in the 1860s, the Franco-Prussian war in the Seventies, the Boer War around the turn of the 20th century, later two world wars and the space age.
When the paper was born in 1851, amid a growth of local feeling and civic pride, as the Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner, we were still paying stamp duty on newspapers.
By 1853 the Examiner had dropped the Holmfirth part of its title and was outselling its local rivals but still a weekly rather than a daily publication and Huddersfield was still to be forged into a borough with its own council.
The Examiner's own story of how staff were called back for a heroic stint on Saturday, January 28, 1871 in order to forestall a rival and become the town's first daily paper is a classic in itself.
We were equally ahead of the game in 1888 when we became the first provincial paper to employ a woman journalist. Later there were other significant and surprising firsts - it was as late as 1946 that the Examiner began employing its own photographers, as late as November 1953 that news appeared on the front page for the first time.
More recently the Examiner was taken over by Trinity Holdings and in 1999 became part of Trinity Mirror, the biggest newspaper publisher in the UK.
It has been an epic journey and it is hard to look back without a lump in the throat. It is sobering to think that the early journalists worked with at best dip-in ink pens (we would like to think possibly the quills depicted on the entrance to our old Ramsden Street home) and certainly not in electric light.
One thing is sure. In all that time the Examiner could never afford to stand still at the risk of being overtaken by its competitors.
That still is the same story today.
April 2004 is another great watershed for us and our readers.
Now comes in the latest digital cameras for our photographers, a new compact format and a new print home at Oldham.
Today is Examiner edition number 46,186 and nearly 45,000 of those have been in the broadsheet format. But for 25 years now the Examiner has been in its compact shape on Saturdays.
So we don't think you'll find the change a big one. In return you'll get a more colourful, dynamic, up to date Examiner, fully equipped for the challenges of the 21st century, while mindful of our historic past and our duty to you, the reader.
See you at the start of the new era on Monday!
