History & Myths

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/celebs/commerce/commerce4.html

waldo's answer is a little short

Eddie Shah ran free papers in the North - Wigan I think, successfully, and found it was less transportable down to London. However, while he was failing, he also revolutionised the production of newspapers, for himself and everyone else. The revolution involved moving from Fleet Street to Wapping, cutting out the linotype operators (politically very strong) cheapening and stream lining the process.

HistoricallyI would draw a strong parallel with Robert Owen of Lanark in the nineteenth century - a visionary factory owner who er went bust.

You're getting confused.  Wapping and Eddie Shah were two completely different industrial disputes.

Eddie Shah was a north of England newspaper proprietor (Stockport, I think).

The Wapping dispute was with News International (The Times/Murdoch).

The Wapping dispute was indeed related to News International. If I remember correctly, though, the issue was that the company was moving from the traditional, labour-intensive (and thus union-intensive) approach to a more technology-based printing system.

It was Eddie Shah who first demonstrated high-tech printing in the UK mainstream media. The ideas he used weren't all that innovative even then (it makes sense, for instance, to send the pages electronically to a number of print works around the country instead of printing in one place and then trucking stuff around) but because he had the opportunity to launch a completely new paper, he was unique in bringing a bunch of sensible ideas together.

"Today" was also the first newspaper to have colour photos - if memory serves they appeared only on a few pages, though. It took a few goes to get the colour registration right (I remember the opening titles of Spitting Image, with the colours all over the place, claiming to be transmitted in "Eddieshahvision") but again, it opened the door for the other papers to follow.