The electric telegraph, it is often said, by separating communication from physical transport, “annihilated” time and space. How did it affect the way in which “Europe” was temporally represented at the fringes of the continent? In this paper I compare how two Swedish provincial newspapers, separated by some 1500 kilometres, used the telegraph and how it affected the temporal aspect of their news. One was published in the southern town Helsingborg, near the Danish border, and the other up in the sparsely populated northern town Piteå. The results indicate that the newspaper physically closest to the continent benefited the most from the new technology. Rather than bringing the northern paper closer to Europe in time, the telegraph through the growing differences made it seem more backward. Situating the papers’ usage of the telegraph in the differing regional contexts of technology and economy has provided possible explanations to this pattern.