HE KNEW he was right. Now he had the conclusive proof he needed. W T Stead, fondly dubbed the father of modern journalism, had long thought these big, new fangled, liners were dangerous.

So when he stood on the deck of the slowly sinking RMS Titanic he knew he was not only in the middle of the biggest story of his career, but one he would be never destined to write.

It is said that having made close acquaintance with his own mortality, Stead resigned himself to his fate, spending his last minutes helping women and children into the lifeboats.

Then he duly perished in the icy depths of the north Atlantic on the night in April 1912 that proved that the so-called unsinkable ship was as vulnerable as a fishing smack when it came to seeing off an iceberg as big as your average government minister's ego.

This is Local Newspaper Week - and fittingly nearly a century later, William Stead is definitely still worth remembering.

His death was a huge loss to his profession for this was the man who put the "Eww" (as in "Eww, that's shocking" or "Eww, that's revolting") into journalism, sewing the seeds of the punchy, "in yer face" tabloid approach.

The News of the World may be the country's best-selling paper but they can rest assured that the Pall Mall Gazette caused just as much reader-upheaval with sex and scandal stories as the recent revelations about David Beckham.

Stead's early years of Christian devotion gave no clue of what was to follow.

Born in 1849, he was the son of a congregational minister.

He left school at 14, working for a Newcastle merchant for seven years.

So far, nothing to warrant even the smallest headline.

However, in his early 20s, Smead jumped from being a mere clerk to editor of the Northern Echo.

It was a gamble, but one which soon paid off as he rattled many a political cage and delighted readers at the same time with his strongly-worded pieces about elections.

But it was when he became editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883 that the outrage started to fly about by the bucket- load.

Two years later the story printed below the headline "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" was to land Stead in a vat of bubbling hot water.

It was his expose of the child sex trade in London, telling how young girls were bought from their mothers and misused by the upper classes.

A thumpingly good story, but Stead slipped up on the accuracy front, landing himself a three-month jail sentence as a result.

Luckily he was recognised as the journalistic inspiration that he undoubtedly was during his lifetime and was deeply mourned following the sinking of Titanic.

Stead left behind many a memorable quote, but one of his most famous is in praise of the newspaper phenomenon, and concluded: "What a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil."

- Originally published April 2002.