Then...

North News & Pictures started life in Borough Road, Middlesbrough, in 1984, supplying photos, news and features to the national newspapers and magazines.

Its founders, Ted and Jane Ditchburn, remain with the company as Managing Director and CFO respectively.

Since those early days in the two-room attic of a terraced shop on Teesside, the company has steadily grown. We moved our HQ to Newcastle in 1991, opened and office in Carlisle a few years later and now have a staff of 23 covering our region.

Our ”patch“ stretches down from the Scottish Borders to North Yorkshire and South Cumbria, where we have been involved in the most important stories of the past two decades.

Sport is important in our region – and we've captured images of many memorable moments in the major events of the period. Every week our photographers cover football at Newcastle United, Middlesbrough and Sunderland and we take in Carlisle, Hartlepool and Darlington too. Our pictures of Newcastle Falcons trophy-winning rugby team, Durham CCC's emergence as a cricketing force, the Great North Run and athletics at Gateshead, are among the ones you're likely to have seen in the papers.

With an extensive library of over a million images, more than 350,000 of them archived digitally, which we can distribute via FTP and URLs to images, or ISDN and Modem, North News & Pictures handles a workflow that would have been hard to imagine even five years ago.