Description
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news website published in London. Founded in 1896, it is the United Kingdom's highest-circulated daily newspaper. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, while Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. 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 current 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, who succeeded Geordie Greig 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, it has a majority female readership, with women making up 52–55% of its readers. It had an average daily circulation of 1,134,184 copies in February 2020. Between April 2019 and March 2020 it had an average daily readership of approximately 2.180 million, of whom approximately 1.407 million were in the ABC1 demographic and .773 million in the C2DE demographic. Its website has more than 218 million unique visitors per month.
The Daily Mail has won several awards, including receiving the National Newspaper of the Year award from The Press Awards eight times since 1995, winning again in 2019. The Society of Editors selected it as the 'Daily Newspaper of the Year' for 2020. The Daily Mail has also been criticised for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research, and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement. In February 2017, editors on the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a source.
