THE DAILY MAIL, ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

Today, The Grandma has been reading the Daily Mail, the British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper, that becomes the first major London newspaper to be published on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in 1944.

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper founded in 1896, and news website published in London. 

As of 2020 it was the highest paid circulation newspaper in the UK.

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 website, although the website is managed separately and has its own editor.

The paper is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. 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. Uniquely for a British daily newspaper, women make up the majority (52-55%) of its readership.

It had an average daily circulation of 1.13 million copies in February 2020. 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. Its website had more than 218 million unique visitors per month in 2020.

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). The Society of Editors selected it as the Daily Newspaper of the Year for 2020.

The Daily Mail has been criticised for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories about science and medical research, and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement.

In February 2017, the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a reliable source.

The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format 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 (DMGT), is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount 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 that rose to 500,000 in 1899. Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the Daily Mail as a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys.

By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world.

In 1900, the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so (in 1899, the Daily Mail had organised special trains to bring the London-printed papers north). The same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers.

Printing of the Scottish Daily Mail was switched from Edinburgh to the Deansgate plant in Manchester in 1968 and, for a while, The People was also printed on the Mail presses in Deansgate. 

In 1987, printing at Deansgate ended, and the northern editions were thereafter printed at other Associated Newspapers plants.

In 1944, the Daily Mail becomes the first major London newspaper to be published on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Daily Mail has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2011, 2016 and 2019 by the British Press Awards.

More information: Daily Mail

I think journalism is a great way to do public service,
to have an impact on your community.

Bob Schieffer