Josiah Blackburn

Josiah Blackburn (6 March 1823 – 11 November 1890) was an English-born Canadian newspaper publisher, journalist, and political figure. In 1852 he purchased a struggling weekly newspaper in the frontier town of London, Canada West, and within a generation built it into the London Free Press, one of the most influential newspapers in Ontario. Blackburn is regarded as one of Canada's most important nineteenth-century newspapermen: an innovator in advertising, circulation, and reporting practice, and a politically well-connected figure whose paper moved from Reform to Conservative allegiance under his direction. The Free Press remained under the control of his descendants for more than a century after his death.

Early life

Josiah Blackburn was born on 6 March 1823 in London, England, the third son of the Reverend John Blackburn, a leading Congregational minister who held the pulpit of Claremont Chapel in London for some thirty-five years and served for many years as secretary of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. His mother, Sarah Smith, was the daughter of Robert Smith, a landed proprietor of Essex. Josiah was educated at the City of London School and Mill Hill School, Better documented was his father's own descent from the Suffolk Juxon family: its most distinguished member, Bishop William Juxon (1582–1663), attended Charles I on the scaffold at his execution in 1649 and received from the condemned king a ring engraved with the word "Memento," later preserved in the British Museum. After Emma's death, Blackburn married a second time, to Marion Billington, in 1886.