Long-time Bermuda Press president Roger Davidson stewarded The Royal Gazette and its parent company through a long and hugely consequential period of change, growth and transition on a scale not seen since this newspaper was established in 1828.

Mr Davidson died this week at the age of 78 after a long illness.

His tenure as a director and, later, as president of Bermuda Press (Holdings) Ltd. spanned 43 years, extending from the island’s tourism heyday to its emergence as a blue-chip international financial centre, from the era of hot lead typesetting to the internet age.

When he joined the board of the Bermuda Press in 1965 at the age of just 28, The Royal Gazette was the same publication it had been for decades: Bermuda’s premier news outlet, a professional and ethical operation, certainly, and well respected but not always well liked. At the time, the newspaper was both institutionally staid and sometimes slow to recognise and respond to the unprecedented social change taking place in the island around it.

And the newspaper was even farther behind the times when it came to the technological changes that the global printing industry had started to embrace in the 1950s and which laid the groundwork for the full-blown digital revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Bermuda Press was also in something perilously close to dire financial straits — its total assets amounted to just £12,000 or so when Mr Davidson assumed the company’s presidency in 1967.

Shortly after taking the company’s helm, Mr Davidson presided over a period of steady expansion, which reflected his view that it was essential for the company to be profitable and viable if Bermuda hoped to maintain a vibrant, independent media voice.

The late David L. White, who was editor of The Royal Gazette between 1976 and 1998, and who worked closely with Mr Davidson during this period, once said: “Maintaining a healthy bottom line was always fundamental to his thinking.

“Roger’s philosophy was straightforward enough: the newspapers could only continue to engage in good journalism if the parent company was continuing to generate solid revenues.

“So he never made any apologies for wanting to buttress and reinforce the business side of Bermuda Press because he recognised the simple reality there could be no journalistic operations unless we were on solid financial ground. As Roger used to joke: ‘A ‘free’ press actually requires somebody to pay the bills.”

Mr Davidson, a man of granite principles, was a firm believer in the importance of a free and independent press in Bermuda, one that held those in power accountable and told the stories that the community needed to hear.

Even while the business was being diversified and put on a more secure financial footing with expansion into commercial printing, retail and real estate, maintaining The Royal Gazette and its weekly sister paper, the Mid-Ocean News, as Bermuda’s most trusted and credible news sources remained at the forefront of his thinking.

The newspapers became altogether more sensitive, reflective and responsive to the needs of the Bermuda community under his leadership.

They also became more profitable and better read.

New feature sections were introduced that complemented the publications’ primary focus on hard news rather than detracting from it, drawing new readers and advertising dollars.

And although the company came late to the concepts of automated typesetting and high-speed printing, it embraced both techniques under Mr Davidson as ways to improve efficiency and the quality of its publications as well as to reduce costs.

For the most part, Mr Davidson left the job of producing the newspapers to those he hired for those jobs: the managers on the business side and the editors in the newsrooms.

While he issued general guidelines for how he wanted to see the publications run and set high standards he expected to be routinely met, he was very much hands-off in terms of day-to-day operations.

Mr Davidson strongly believed journalistic integrity could best be maintained if there was a clear demarcation line between the company’s corporate hierarchy and editorially independent newsrooms.

More from White, one of five Royal Gazette editors during Mr Davidson’s long tenure as president: “Roger’s confidence in the people who earned his trust was near total. He did not want to play at being the backseat editor of the paper — ever.

“He neither attempted to dictate editorial policy, nor did he interfere with the policies his editors decided on — even if he may have disagreed with some of them.

“Roger was there to set the direction and tone, offer advice and act as an adjudicator of sorts for those disagreements which inevitably did spring up from time to time between other members of the Bermuda Press board of directors and the editors of the newspapers. And he prided himself on having never once attempted to impose his own personal views on either the Gazette or the Mid-Ocean.”

Any suggestions or criticisms he had to make to his editors tended to be delivered firmly but sotto voce, the velvet glove always far more in evidence than the mailed fist

Given the sometimes tempestuous nature of local politics, at various times Mr Davidson came under considerable pressure from senior members of the both the United Bermuda Party and the Progressive Labour Party to rein in the reporting of the company’s newspapers.

But not only did he never cave to political pressure, he viewed it as a kind of backhanded compliment to the integrity and independence of Bermuda Press publications.

And upholding a newspaper’s right to publish in the face of official efforts to restrict access to information of compelling public interest was something like an article of faith for him.

He viewed his position at the Bermuda Press as very much akin to presiding over a public trust and he backed legal challenges to any attempts at state censorship as a matter of civic duty and personal honour, no matter how long, costly or exhausting these efforts proved to be.

Preserving and extending press freedom in Bermuda in defiance of capricious acts by governments eager to hide the egg on their face by way of official suppression was a non-negotiable point for Mr Davidson.

“Donald McPhee Lee is remembered as the man who founded The Royal Gazette in 1828,” White said when Mr Davidson stepped down as president in 2008. “But I think it’s fair to say Roger Davidson will be remembered as the individual who did the most to secure its future, revitalise it and prepared it to be relevant and competitive in the 21st century.”