Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper published in London. It was founded in 1896. As of 2020, it was the highest paid circulation newspaper in the UK.[5] Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, a Scottish edition was launched in 1947, and an Irish edition in 2006. Content from the paper appears on the MailOnline news website, although the website is managed separately and has its own editor.[6][7][8]
This article is about the British national daily newspaper. For other uses, see Daily Mail (disambiguation).Type
The paper is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust.[9] Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, a great-grandson of one of the original co-founders, is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail and General Trust, while day-to-day editorial decisions for the newspaper are usually made by a team led by the editor. Ted Verity succeeded Geordie Greig as editor on 17 November 2021.
A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58, and it had the lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds among the major British dailies.[10] Uniquely for a British daily newspaper, women make up the majority (52–55%) of its readership.[11] It had an average daily circulation of 1.13 million copies in February 2020.[12] Between April 2019 and March 2020 it had an average daily readership of approximately 2.18 million, of whom approximately 1.41 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 0.77 million in the C2DE demographic.[13] Its website had more than 218 million unique visitors per month in 2020.[14]
The Daily Mail has won several awards, including receiving the National Newspaper of the Year award from The Press Awards nine times since 1994 (as of 2020).[15] The Society of Editors selected it as the 'Daily Newspaper of the Year' for 2020.[16] The Daily Mail has been criticised for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories about science and medical research,[17][18][19][20] and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement.[21][22][23][24] In February 2017, the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a reliable source.[25][26][27]
Overview
The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding.[28] 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 (DMGT), is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in February 2020 show gross daily sales of 1,134,184 for the Daily Mail.[12] 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.[29] 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's editor was free to decide editorial policy, including its political allegiance.[30] On 17 November 2021, Ted Verity began a new seven-day role as editor of Mail newspapers, with responsibility for the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and You magazine.[31]
Editorial stance
As a right-wing tabloid,[1][2][3] the Mail is traditionally a supporter of the Conservative Party. It has endorsed the party in every UK general election since 1945, with the one exception of the October 1974 UK general election, where it endorsed a Liberal and Conservative coalition.[122][123][124][125] While the paper retained its support for the Conservative Party at the 2015 general election, the paper urged conservatively inclined voters to support UKIP in the constituencies of Heywood and Middleton, Dudley North, and Great Grimsby where UKIP was the main challenger to the Labour Party.
The Mail has published pieces by Joanna Blythman opposing the growing of genetically modified crops in the United Kingdom.[126]
On international affairs, the Mail broke with the establishment media consensus over the 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia. The Mail accused the British government of dragging Britain into an unnecessary confrontation with Russia and of hypocrisy regarding its protests over Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence, citing the British government's own recognition of Kosovo's independence from Russia's ally Serbia.[127]
The Daily Mail endorsed voting leave in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.[128]
The Daily Mail has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2011, 2016 and 2019[129] by the British Press Awards.
Daily Mail journalists have won a range of British Press Awards, including:
Other awards include:
Noted reporting
Suffragette
The term "suffragette" was first used in 1906, as a term of derision by the journalist Charles E. Hands in the Mail to describe activists in the movement for women's suffrage, in particular members of the WSPU.[135][136][137] However, the women he intended to ridicule embraced the term, saying "suffraGETtes" (hardening the 'g'), implying not only that they wanted the vote, but that they intended to 'get' it.[138]
The Daily Mail in literature
The Daily Mail has appeared in several novels. These include Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop which was based on Waugh's experiences as a writer for the Daily Mail. In the book the newspaper is renamed The Daily Beast.[271]
The newspaper appeared in Nicci French's 2008 novel The Memory Game, a psychological thriller.[272]
In 2015, it featured in Laurence Simpson's comic novel about the tabloid media, According to The Daily Mail.[273]