Lagos Weekly Record was a newspaper started in 1890 by John Payne Jackson, published in Lagos every Saturday with an annual subscription of eighteen shillings. The paper survived its early years in part due to personal donations and became in time, not only the most commercially successful among its contemporaries, but also an arsenal of ideas from which opponents of the government took their weapons. It was often critical of British colonization and control of Lagos.
The Lagos colonial governor, Walter Egerton, in reaction to a stand taken by the Lagos Weekly Record complained to the colonial office in 1907 that “it is well known that this newspaper is notorious for the virulence and malice of its misstatements against all government officials from the Governor downwards.”
Lagos Weekly Record also inveighed regularly against the excesses of Frederick Lugard, the Governor-General of Nigeria. When the editor, Jackson died, the paper fell into the hands of his son, Thomas Horatio Jackson. By 1925, another paper, the Lagos Daily News had succeeded the Lagos Weekly Record as the principal Nigerian nationalist organ.