Moss, a sub at the age of 19, was in the vanguard of new technology
Tony Moss, head of production at the Western Morning News, has retired after a 42-year career in regional newspapers.
He began at the Buxton Advertiser in Derbyshire and was then a reporter on the Kentish Express and Stoke-on-Trent City Times. He became a sub-editor at 19 on the Gloucestershire Echo.
By the time his WMN editor Barrie Williams met him, Moss was deputy chief sub at the Nottingham Evening Post. The pair have worked together for the past 24 years.
Moss was in the vanguard of a revolution at the Post in 1976 when it became the first newspaper in Europe to introduce direct input technology for journalists – “a decade at least before most of the rest of the industry grasped the nettle,” said Williams.
After leaving to run a PR company in Nottingham, Moss returned to the Post in 1983 as features editor, then production editor and then assistant editor in charge of production.
Williams was appointed to relaunch the WMN in 1997 “and it was unthinkable to me that I should do it without Mossy,” he said.
In that time, the pair have produced 26,208 editions of the Post and WMN.
Moss, 62, is to start a consultancy business.
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