"The Northern Echo" was started by John Hyslop Bell with the backing of the Pease family, largely to counter the conservative outpourings of rival newspapers, the "Darlington &amp; Stockton Times" and the "Darlington Mercury". The paper enjoyed early success under its second editor, W. T. Stead, an early pioneer of investigative journalism, who brought the paper international notoriety during the Bulgarian Atrocities agitation in 1876. Leading Liberals such as Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain became great admirers, and the historian E. A. Freeman went so far as to declare the "Northern Echo", as "the best paper in Europe."