news and information in their sports pages. At various times in history, there has been more than one racing daily, and fierce rivalries have existed between them. For most of the 20th century, the Sporting Life and Sporting Chronicle were the two competing papers, before the Manchester-based Chronicle closed in 1983 due to debts and falling circulation. The Racing Post was founded in 1986 to fill the gap and challenge the Sporting Life monopoly that resulted and these two were rivals throughout the 80s and 90s. Ultimately, only the Post survived as the owners of the Sporting Life, Trinity Mirror, closed the Life and took over the Racing Post trademark. In the Victorian era, there was a wide range of sporting newspapers that carried racing news to a greater or lesser extent. These include Bell's Life in London (forerunner to the Sporting Life), The Sporting Times and The Sportsman (not to be confused with the short-lived 2006 newspaper of the same name). In 1840, Bell's Life is reported to compete with the Sunday Times as the two weekly turf newspapers. There were also four monthly magazines at that time – the Old Sporting Magazine (founded 1792), the New Sporting Magazine (founded 1824), the Sporting Review (founded 1837) and the Sportsman (stated to have originated in 1829, so not the same as the Sportsman above which was founded in 1865). However, coverage of horse racing in newspapers is believed to date as far back as the Evening English Chronicle in 1779. Television There are two dedicated horse racing channels on British digital television – Sky Sports Racing (free to air) and Racing TV (subscription only). Daily broadcasts of British race meetings are split between the two according to contracts arranged by racecourses and racecourse owning groups. Saturday racing and key midweek festival meetings are also broadcast on terrestrial television by ITV. The channel broadcasts a Saturday afternoon programme of live racing, usually between 1.30pm and 4pm, and an hour-long weekly magazine show on Saturday mornings. The coverage is presented by Ed Chamberlin and Oli Bell with AP McCoy, Alice Plunkett, Mick Fitzgerald and Francesca Cumani. 60 days of racing are shown on ITV4, and 40 days of racing are shown on ITV. ITV had previously shown horse racing since its first weeks on air in 1955, and in the 1970s it provided an alternative to BBC coverage with the ITV Seven