The Daily Sport

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The Daily Sport is a tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom by Sport Newspapers, owned by the pornographer David Sullivan. The daily paper was launched in 1991, following on from its Sunday sister title, The Sunday Sport (first published in 1986).

The Sport places itself in the same segment of the tabloid market as The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Daily Star (a paper once controlled by Sport owner David Sullivan). It has tried to find a niche by giving little attention to political news or world current events, instead its news coverage indulges more in yellow journalism, with stories generally taken from minor agencies and wire copy, with an emphasis on celebrities, bad behaviour and toilet humour. The principal reason for this is to save cost, not only that incurred in running a network of journalists but also the charges of major news agencies for more substantial reportage. This paucity of real news has led to the question of whether The Sport merits the description "newspaper" at all. The two papers are famous for stories in the style of "I saw Elvis Presley working in my local Tesco", which could be regarded as totally fabricated. The Sport publishes a large amount of mild softcore pornography every day, specialising in fake nude pictures of celebrities with captions such as "Celebrity's fury at fake nude pics!". The front page often features these pictures with the added caption "See inside for more", and also paparazzi "upskirt" pictures of celebrities getting into and out of cars, etc.

The paper carries very little, if any, normal advertising for regular products. One essential for consideration as a serious medium for advertising is a listing with ABC, which publishes monthly circulation data to subscribers, but the paper has eschewed membership at various times. A feature of the paper is the section of "classified" advertisements, which in reality comprises a series of one-line advertisements for prostitutes and similar services up and down the country.

The Sport claims to have launched the careers of numerous nude models, among them is Linsey Dawn McKenzie, who began posing topless for the newspaper in 1994 and Cherry Dee who began posing topless for them in 2003 when they were sixteen (the legal age of consent for such activity in the UK at the time). Among recent popular Sport models are Kelly Bell, Hannah Claydon and Lauren Pope, however, very few Sport models also appear in the tabloids which the paper regards as its rivals. This is because The Sport makes a feature of models whose chests are obviously surgically enhanced, which the other papers avoid. There was also an issue with the captions sometimes published by the paper claiming "First legal pictures of Miss x on her sixteenth birthday" - if that were truly her sixteenth birthday, the pictures would have had to have been taken earlier, when she was illegally under-aged, to be available for publication.

The Daily Sport and The Sunday Sport were sold by David Sullivan to Sport Newspapers Group in 2007. The papers are being relaunched in April 2008 under the editorial leadership of Barry McIlheney and James Brown.^[1]

[edit] Trivia

When Viz produced a spoof version of the Daily Sport featuring animals talking about their sex-lives, the legally-compulsory small print phrase "Registered at the Post Office as a newspaper" was changed to "Registered at the Post Office as an aid to masturbation".