Daily Sketch

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Daily Sketch was a British national tabloid newspaper, founded in Manchester in 1909 by Sir Edward Hulton.

It was bought in 1920 by Lord Rothermere's Daily Mirror Newspapers but in 1925 Rothermere offloaded it to William and Gomer Berry (later Viscount Camrose and Viscount Kemsley), who merged it with the Daily Graphic.

It was owned by a subsidiary the Berrys' Allied Newspapers (renamed Kemsley Newspapers in 1937 when Camrose withdrew to concentrate his efforts on the Daily Telegraph) until 1952, and from 1946 it was renamed the Daily Graphic. Then, however, Kemsley decided to sell the paper to Associated Newspapers, the owner of the Daily Mail, who promptly renamed it the Daily Sketch. The paper struggled through the 1950s and 1960s, never managing to compete successfully with the Daily Mirror, and in 1971 it was closed and merged with the Daily Mail.

The Sketch was Conservative in its politics and populist in its tone throughout its life through all its changes of ownership. In some ways much of the more populist element of today's Daily Mail was inherited from the Sketch; before the merger, the Mail was a broadsheet and was more serious, although still right-wing. The Sketch notably launched a moral panic over Daniel Farson's 1960 television documentary Living for Kicks, a portrait of British teenage life at the time, which led to a war of words between it and the Daily Mirror.