Newspapers are a heavily used resource in the pursuit of history but, as Maurice Walsh observed ten years ago, there is an ‘evident reluctance in Irish historiography to take an interest in the work of journalists’. While a small but growing group of historians have increasingly looked at Irish journalism as a subject of study in its own right (a development noted by John Horgan in his useful foreword to this new volume), the provincial press has received less attention as a topic in and of itself, despite the enthusiastic plundering of local papers by a wide variety of Irish historians. This new volume, edited by Ian Kenneally and James T. O'Donnell, makes a strong case for the value of studying Irish provincial newspapers, and shows them to be far more than simple representations of local opinion. It is a fine example of how the study of journalism, journalists and the regional press can provide broad and valuable insights into the workings of Irish politics and society.

The collection is divided into two sections: ‘The regional press in Ireland's provinces’ and ‘Trends and themes across the Irish regional press’. The first contains six chapters focused on particular newspapers, individuals or locales. In a fairly representative chapter, Mark O'Brien turns his attention to The Kerryman, analysing the publication over the bulk of the twentieth century. It takes a single publication and outlines how the tumultuous events of the century shaped its production and reportage. It is a format O'Brien is well-versed in, having previously written a monograph on the Irish Times in 2008. John Burke, Alan McCarthy, and Anthony Keating provide a similar analysis for the Westmeath Independent, Cork newspapermen, and James W. Upton respectively. It is all impressive research and does what valuable local history often does: tests national narratives against local conditions and enriches our understanding of these narratives as a consequence.

Other chapters are more difficult to compare to existing research and offer original routes through which to approach the regional press. Mark Wehrly analyses the local newspaper industry in Sligo from 1899 to 1922 but looks at the importance of public contracts for the various publications in the county – an oft overlooked but clearly important factor when it came to their survival and political content. In the second section, Anthony Crawley highlights the restrictions and opportunities provided to regional newspapers as a result of them being treated essentially as mass commodities in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crash. The economies of scale afforded by mass ownership of these publications allowed for the cost of production to be less of a factor in these regional newspapers’ survival, but the subsequent crash resulted in layoffs and restructuring across a range of publications, ultimately impacting upon their quality and circulation. These economic factors are but one of the novel approaches to the press seen in this volume. Another original article is offered by Regina Uí Chollatáin and Aoife Whelan, who chart the progress of the Irish language revival through various provincial papers.

James T. O'Donnell's chapter on how regional newspapers sourced their international news is one of the most impressive of the second section. The famous warning of the Skibbereen Eagle to the Russian Tsar in 1898 is repeated in most texts dealing with the historic Irish press and has become something of a cliché among Irish newspaper historians. Underneath the humour of the warning lies the reality that regional newspaper editors often had great interest in international affairs, and how these publications accessed their sources impacted their coverage. O'Donnell's diligent research into the relationship between Irish regional papers and the big news agencies should give pause to any historian assuming that regional editors considered international affairs on the basis of neutral, non-ideological sources, or indeed that these sources were not shaped by Irish publications.

The volume does have some minor shortcomings. The chronology of the chapters is somewhat overbalanced towards the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Of fourteen chapters, eight do not look past 1923. This trend is emphasised by the fact that Christopher Doughan's excellent overview chapter on the development and nature of the Irish provincial press (containing a useful potted historiography on the topic) only focuses on the pre-independence period. Indeed, important periods such as the Northern Irish Troubles get no focused attention in the volume. This is an understandable consequence of it developing from a 2014 conference, and it would be unrealistic to expect comprehensive coverage of all periods from a relatively short volume such as this, but it does lead the publication's title to declare slightly more than it actually delivers. Still, the chapters are of a generally high quality, and in parts ask truly original questions of the nature of newspaper historiography in Ireland. Any serious scholar of the press in Ireland, or of Irish local history, should not overlook it.