The
Daily Mail is a British daily
newspaper. First published in 1896 by
Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after
The Sun. Its sister paper,
The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. The
Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at what is now considered to be the
middle-market and the first British paper to sell a million copies a day.
[3]The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format[4] on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding. On this date it also absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company. The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust is currently a FTSE 250 company and the paper has a circulation of more than two million which is the third-largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper and one of the highest in the world.[5]
Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in July 2009 show gross sales of 2,178,640 for the Daily Mail.[2] According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats.[6] The main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. He testified before a House of Lords select committee that "we need to allow editors the freedom to edit", and therefore the newspaper had no firm political allegiance or policy.[7] The Mail has been edited by Paul Dacre since 1992.
The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies but the print run on the first day was 397,215 and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation which rose to 500,000 in 1899. By 1902, at the end of the Boer War, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world.[8][9]
