Richard Bagley in the Morning Star http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/119165
It was while doing some digging 25 years after the 1984-5 Miners' Strike that the full sweep of history of our great paper really hit home.
In the national newspaper archives at Hendon, north London, edition after edition was raised from the bowels of the building and the changing shape of the paper from its 1930 birth as the Daily Worker, through the '40s, '50s and '60s and beyond was clear.
As the fortunes and level of working-class organisation and political consciousness has waxed and waned so too have the fortunes of our paper.
In the 1980s came the disastrous divisions that allowed a deceitful cabal to smash up the Communist Party of Great Britain - and nearly snuff out the Morning Star too.
In the 1980s too came huge, epoch-changing setbacks for working people. The temporary victory of capital and free-market finance unleashed a whirlwind on us that still whips around us today.
The Morning Star survived the troubles of the 1980s and the '90s, and lives on thanks to generations of readers and staff who have made sacrifices, including going without pay in the bleakest years.
Our challenge now, though, is to turn the constant quest for survival into a plan for growth.
During my nearly 11 years at this paper - a stint which began in October 2001, a matter days after the towers of the World Trade Centre fell to usher in a new era of paranoia, warmongering and hatred - we have progressed, albeit in fits and starts.
In those days the paper was a 12-page, black-and-white affair thrown together on clapped-out computers in a decrepit room within a derelict, otherwise empty tower in Westferry.
Even that period followed the bold step of increasing from eight to 12 pages despite massive financial problems which left the paper staring over a precipice in the late 1990s.
In the event the gamble paid off, dragging the paper from crisis into relative stability and allowing us to move forward again. The dedication of a small band of workers, new supporters and the unrelenting loyalty of readers helped to coax us back to life.
The pace of developments since has often been frustratingly slow, but over the years friends and allies of the Morning Star have rallied around, forged new relationships and helped us to be the paper we are today, with increasingly diverse news and features and more colour and energy in our pages.
But the Morning Star will always reflect the times in which it exists.
The current era is a bleak echo of those early days of the Daily Worker when the pages were filled with reports of hunger marches, means tests, poverty and resistance.
Then, as now, the cause was a huge crisis of capitalism. And the eventual outcome was a global war which destroyed countless lives, hopes and dreams.
It is our responsibilty here at Britain's only daily paper of the left to become a more active participant in our struggle to rid our planet of this exploitative ideology, one which exalts the greedy and the selfish and which sucks our world dry in an orgy of human misery and environmental destruction.
To do this the Morning Star must spread its wings, reach out and form new links with the readers who provide its lifeblood.
In some ways our goal is simple - to become a bigger, more widely read paper that excels at both journalism and at promoting the politics and campaigns which it unashamedly advocates.
But if it were that easy we'd be there already.
The Morning Star can't rely on handouts from corporations and oligarchs, but we do have the best readership in the land, and strong allies in the trade union and labour movement.
Readers and supporters groups will become increasingly important in the coming period, as will the assistance of friends who have skills, rather than simply money, that they can donate to our bold project.
So too will contacts outside London - too often the Morning Star has been forced to rely on the intellectual heroin of Press Association tape, and we are aware of the frustration of many of you who feel that we fail to cover campaigning issues fully.
One only need look at the letters page over the past week to see the passion and engagement of readers when it comes to the content of the paper and its broader direction.
Rest assured that the aim is to strike the right balance between the news you can get nowhere else and the essential stories that ensure the Morning Star is the only paper you need.
It's always tough, especially with our small staff, getting everything in that we could.
It's also frustrating when glaring errors or low-quality articles make it into print. There's normally a good reason, not least in the former case the extremely tight schedule we are forced to meet in order to send papers tearing up the motorway to Manchester each night. If we spend too much time tinkering, the paper doesn't make it out at all.
If nothing else, June 18 - the day our first papers roll of the printing Trinity Mirror presses in Oldham and Watford - should herald a new era in terms of quality, boosted by later deadlines.
We plan to increase our coverage in Scotland, a country where we have had severe distribution problems for years and where our supporters have never given up hope of getting their paper back every day of publication.
And we will investigate more regional reporting so that you're more likely to have a Morning Star journalist near you to cover the events we often miss.
All this will take time - and money - and the problems that sparked our lifeline appeal last year haven't gone away.
So the next 12 months really will be make or break for the paper.
We will be engaging with you over the next few months to get to know your interests and what you want from your paper, the only national daily owned by its readers.
We'll also be reaching out to give you the skills we need so that you can l help us to get your stories into print.
And crucially we'll be asking you to talk to people who should be reading the paper and aren't to find out why.
The challenges that we as a society face demand a newspaper that is able to act as an informative organising weapon in our working-class arsenal.
In print and via the internet that's precisely the plan.
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