The 21 April 2011 front page of The Times |
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Compact |
| Owner | News Corporation |
| Editor | James Harding |
| Founded | 1 January 1785 (227 years, 46 days) |
| Political alignment | Moderate |
| Headquarters | Wapping, London, England |
| Circulation | 441,205 (July 2011)[1] |
| Sister newspapers | The Sunday Times |
| ISSN | 0140-0460 |
| Official website | www.thetimes.co.uk |
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register (it became The Times on 1 January 1788). The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International. News International is in turn wholly owned by the News Corporation group, headed by Rupert Murdoch. The Times had an average daily circulation in July 2011 of 441,205.[1]
The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as The Times of India (1838), The Straits Times (1845), The New York Times (1851), The Irish Times (1859), the Los Angeles Times (1881), The Seattle Times (1891), The Daily Times (Malawi) (1900), and The Times (Malta) (1935). For distinguishing purposes it is therefore sometimes referred to, particularly in North America, as the 'London Times' or 'The Times of London'.[2][3]
The paper is also the originator of the ubiquitous Times Roman typeface, originally developed by Stanley Morison of The Times in collaboration with the Monotype Corporation for its legibility in low-tech printing.
The Times was printed in broadsheet format for 219 years, but switched to compact size in 2004 partly in an attempt to appeal to younger readers and partly to appeal to commuters using public transport. An American edition has been published since 6 June 2006.[2]
Though traditionally a moderate newspaper and sometimes a supporter of the Conservatives, it supported the Labour Party in the 2001 and 2005 general elections.[4] In 2004, according to MORI, the voting intentions of its readership were 40% for the Conservative Party, 29% for the Liberal Democrats, 26% for Labour.[5]
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The newspaper's cover price in the United Kingdom is £1.00 on weekdays (30p for students at some university campus shops) and £1.50 on Saturdays. The Times's sister paper, The Sunday Times, is a broadsheet and priced at £2.20. Although The Times and The Sunday Times are both owned by News International, they do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have shared the same owner only since 1967. In November 2006 The Times began printing headlines in its new font, Times Modern.
The Times was founded by publisher John Walter on 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, with Walter in the role of editor. Walter changed the title after 940 editions on 1 January 1788 to The Times. In 1803, Walter handed ownership and editorship to his son of the same name. Walter senior had spent sixteen months in Newgate prison for libel printed in The Times, but his pioneering efforts to obtain Continental news, especially from France, helped build the paper's reputation among policy makers and financiers.
The Times used contributions from significant figures in the fields of politics, science, literature, and the arts to build its reputation. For much of its early life, the profits of The Times were very large and the competition minimal, so it could pay far better than its rivals for information or writers.
In 1809, John Stoddart was appointed general editor, replaced in 1817 by Thomas Barnes. Under Barnes and his successor in 1841, John Thadeus Delane, the influence of The Times rose to great heights, especially in politics and amongst the City of London. Peter Fraser and Edward Sterling were two noted journalists, and gained for The Times the pompous/satirical nickname 'The Thunderer' (from "We thundered out the other day an article on social and political reform.").The increased circulation and influence of the paper was based in part to its early adoption of the steam-driven rotary printing press. Distribution via steam trains to rapidly growing concentrations of urban populations helped ensure the profitability of the paper and its growing influence.[6]
The Times was the first newspaper to send war correspondents to cover particular conflicts. W. H. Russell, the paper's correspondent with the army in the Crimean War, was immensely influential[7] with his dispatches back to England.
In other events of the nineteenth century, The Times opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws until the number of demonstrations convinced the editorial board otherwise, and only reluctantly supported aid to victims of the Irish Potato Famine. It enthusiastically supported the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which reduced corruption and increased the electorate from 400 000 people to 800 000 people (still a small minority of the population). During the American Civil War, The Times represented the view of the wealthy classes, favouring the secessionists, but it was not a supporter of slavery.
The third John Walter, the founder's grandson, succeeded his father in 1847. The paper continued as more or less independent, but from the 1850s The Times was beginning to suffer from the rise in competition from the penny press, notably The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post.
During the 19th century, it was not infrequent for the Foreign Office to approach The Times and ask for continental intelligence, which was often superior to that conveyed by official sources.[8]
The Times faced financial extinction in 1890 under Arthur Fraser Walter, but it was rescued by an energetic editor, Charles Frederic Moberly Bell. During his tenure (1890–1911), The Times became associated with selling the Encyclopædia Britannica using aggressive American marketing methods introduced by Horace Everett Hooper and his advertising executive, Henry Haxton. Due to legal fights between the Britannica's two owners, Hooper and Walter Montgomery Jackson, The Times severed its connection in 1908 and was bought by pioneering newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe.
In editorials published on 29 and 31 July 1914, Wickham Steed, the Times's Chief Editor, argued that the British Empire should enter World War I.[9] On 8 May 1920, also under the editorship of Steed, The Times in an editorial endorsed the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a genuine document, and called Jews the world's greatest danger. In the leader entitled "The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry", Steed wrote about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
What are these 'Protocols'? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? Are they forgery? If so, whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in part fulfilled, in part so far gone in the way of fulfillment?".[10]
The following year, when Philip Graves, the Constantinople (modern Istanbul) correspondent of The Times, exposed The Protocols as a forgery, 'The Times retracted the editorial of the previous year.
In 1922, John Jacob Astor, son of the 1st Viscount Astor, bought The Times from the Northcliffe estate. The paper gained a measure of notoriety in the 1930s with its advocacy of German appeasement; then-editor Geoffrey Dawson was closely allied with those in the government who practised appeasement, most notably Neville Chamberlain.
Kim Philby, a Soviet double agent, was a correspondent for the newspaper in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Philby was admired for his courage in obtaining high-quality reporting from the front lines of the bloody conflict. He later joined MI6 during World War II, was promoted into senior positions after the war ended, then eventually defected to the Soviet Union in 1963.[11]
Between 1941 and 1946, the left-wing British historian E.H. Carr was Assistant Editor. Carr was well known for the strongly pro-Soviet tone of his editorials.[12] In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens between the Greek Communist ELAS and the British Army, Carr in a Times editorial sided with the Communists, leading Winston Churchill to condemn him and that leader in a speech to the House of Commons.[13] As a result of Carr's editorial, The Times became popularly known during World War II as the threepenny Daily Worker (the price of the Daily Worker was one penny)[14]
On 3 May 1966 it started printing news on the front page for the first time - previously the front page featured small advertisements, usually of interest to the moneyed classes in British society. In 1967, members of the Astor family sold the paper to Canadian publishing magnate Roy Thomson, The Thomson Corporation merged it with The Sunday Times to form Times Newspapers Limited.
An industrial dispute prompted the management to shut the paper for nearly a year (1 December 1978 – 12 November 1979).
The Thomson Corporation management were struggling to run the business due to the 1979 Energy Crisis and union demands. Management were left with no choice but to save both titles by finding a buyer who was in a position to guarantee the survival of both titles, and also one who had the resources and was committed to funding the introduction of modern printing methods.
Several suitors appeared, including Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland and Lord Rothermere; however, only one buyer was in a position to meet the full Thomson remit, Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
In 1981, The Times and The Sunday Times were bought from Thomson by Rupert Murdoch's News International. The acquisition followed three weeks of intensive bargaining with the unions by company negotiators, John Collier and Bill O'Neill.
Murdoch soon began making his mark on the paper, replacing its editor, William Rees-Mogg, with Harold Evans in 1981. One of his most important changes was the introduction of new technology and efficiency measures. In March–May 1982, following agreement with print unions, the hot-metal Linotype printing process used to print The Times since the 19th century was phased out and replaced by computer input and photo-composition. This allowed print room staff at The Times and The Sunday Times to be reduced by half. However, direct input of text by journalists ("single stroke" input) was still not achieved, and this was to remain an interim measure until the Wapping dispute of 1986, when The Times moved from New Printing House Square in Gray's Inn Road (near Fleet Street) to new offices in Wapping.[15]
In June 1990, The Times ceased its policy of using courtesy titles ("Mr", "Mrs", or "Miss" prefixes) for living persons before full names on first reference, but it continues to use them before surnames on subsequent references. The more formal style is now confined to the "Court and Social" page, though "Ms" is now acceptable in that section, as well as before surnames in news sections.
In November 2003, News International began producing the newspaper in both broadsheet and tabloid sizes. On 13 September 2004, the weekday broadsheet was withdrawn from sale in Northern Ireland. Since 1 November 2004, the paper has been printed solely in tabloid format.
The Conservative Party announced plans to launch litigation against The Times over an incident in which the newspaper claimed that Conservative election strategist Lynton Crosby had admitted that his party would not win the 2005 General Election. The Times later published a clarification, and the litigation was dropped.
On 6 June 2005, The Times redesigned its Letters page, dropping the practice of printing correspondents' full postal addresses. Published letters were long regarded as one of the paper's key constituents. Author/solicitor David Green of Castle Morris Pembrokeshire has had more letters published on the main letters page than any other known contributor – 158 by 31 January 2008. According to its leading article, "From Our Own Correspondents", removal of full postal addresses was in order to fit more letters onto the page.
In a 2007 meeting with the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications, which was investigating media ownership and the news, Murdoch stated that the law and the independent board prevented him from exercising editorial control.[16]
In May 2008 printing of The Times switched from Wapping to new plants at Broxbourne on the outskirts of London, and Merseyside and Glasgow, enabling the paper to be produced with full colour on every page for the first time.
Long considered the UK's newspaper of record, The Times is generally seen as a serious publication with high standards of journalism. It is not without trenchant critics: Robert Fisk,[17] seven times British International Journalist of the Year,[18] resigned as foreign correspondent in 1988 over what he saw as "political censorship" of his article on the shooting-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988. He wrote in detail about his reasons for resigning from the paper due to meddling with his stories, and the papers' pro-Israel stance.[19]
Some allege that The Times' partisan opinion pieces also damage its status as 'paper of record,' particularly when attacking interests that go against those of its parent company – News International. In 2010 it published an opinion piece attacking the BBC for being 'one of a group of' signatories to a letter criticising BSkyB share options in October 2010.[20]
The British Business Survey 2005 named The Times as the UK's leading daily newspaper for business people. This independent survey was sponsored by The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, and The Times.
The latest figures from the national readership survey show The Times to have the highest number of ABC1 25–44 readers and the largest numbers of readers in London of any of the "quality" papers.[21] The certified average circulation figures for November 2005 show that The Times sold 692,581 copies per day. This was the highest achieved under the last editor, Robert Thomson, and ensured that the newspaper remained ahead of The Daily Telegraph in terms of full-rate sales, although the Telegraph remains the market leader for broadsheets, with a circulation of 905,955 copies. Tabloid newspapers, such as The Sun and middle-market newspapers such as the Daily Mail, at present outsell both papers with a circulation of around 3,005,308 and 2,082,352 respectively. By March 2010 the paper's circulation had fallen to 502,436 copies daily and the Telegraph's to 686,679, according to ABC figures.
The Times features news for the first half of the paper with the leading articles on the second page, the Opinion/Comment section begins after the first news section, the world news normally follows this. The business pages begin on the centre spread, and are followed by The Register, containing obituaries, Court & Social section, and related material. The sport section is at the end of the main paper.
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) is a separately-paid-for weekly literature and society magazine.
Between 1951 and 1966 The Times published a separately-paid-for quarterly science review, The Times Science Review. Remarkably, in 1953 both the newspaper and its science supplement failed to report on the discovery of the structure of DNA in Cambridge, which was reported on by both the News Chronicle and The New York Times.
The Times started a new (but free) monthly science magazine, Eureka, in October 2009.
The Times's main supplement is the times2, featuring various lifestyle columns. It was discontinued on 1 March 2010 but reintroduced on 11 October 2010 after negative feedback. Its regular features include a puzzles section called Mind Games. Its previous incarnation began on 5 September 2005, before which it was called T2 and previously Times 2. Regular features include columns by a different columnist each weekday. There was a column by Marcus du Sautoy each Wednesday, for example. The back pages are devoted to puzzles and contain sudoku, "Killer Sudoku", "KenKen", word polygon puzzles, and a crossword simpler and more concise than the main "Times Crossword".
The supplement contains arts and lifestyle features, TV and radio listings and reviews.
The Game is included in the newspaper on Mondays, and details all the weekend's football activity (Premier League and Football League Championship, League One and League Two.) The Scottish edition of The Game also includes results and analysis from Scottish Premier League games.
The Saturday edition of The Times contains a variety of supplements. These supplements were relaunched in January 2009 as: Sport, Weekend (including travel and lifestyle features), Saturday Review (arts, books, and ideas), The Times Magazine (columns on various topics), and Playlist (an entertainment listings guide).
Saturday Review is the first regular supplement published in broadsheet format since the paper switched to a compact size in 2004.
At the beginning of summer 2011 Saturday Review switched to the tabloid format
The Times Magazine features columns touching on various subjects such as celebrities, fashion and beauty, food and drink, homes and gardens or simply writers' anecdotes. Notable contributors include Giles Coren, Food and Drink Writer of the Year in 2005.
The Times and The Sunday Times have had an online presence since March 1999, originally at the-times.co.uk and sunday-times.co.uk, and later at timesonline.co.uk.[22] In April 2009, the timesonline site had a readership of 750,000 readers per day.[23]
Rupert Murdoch argued that readers should pay for online content, and since July 2010, News International requires readers that do not subscribe to the print edition to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access The Times and The Sunday Times content.[24]
There are now two websites, instead of one: thetimes.co.uk is aimed at daily readers, and the thesundaytimes.co.uk site at providing weekly magazine-like content.
According to figures released in November 2010 by The Times, 100,000 people had paid to use the service in its first four months of operation, and another 100,000 received free access because they subscribe to the printed paper. Visits to the websites have decreased by 87% since the paywall was introduced, from 21 million unique users per month to 2.7 million.[25]
The Times commissioned the serif typeface Times New Roman, created by Victor Lardent at the English branch of Monotype, in 1931.[26] It was commissioned after Stanley Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically antiquated.[27] The font was supervised by Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older font named Plantin as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space. Times New Roman made its debut in the 3 October 1932 issue of The Times newspaper.[28] After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. The Times stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004 have caused the newspaper to switch font five times since 1972. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman font:
The Times, along with the British Film Institute, sponsors the "The Times" bfi London Film Festival. As of 2005[update], it is Europe's largest public event for motion pictures.
The Times sponsors the Cheltenham Literature Festival and the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature at Asia House, London.
The Times had declared its support for Clement Attlee's Labour at the 1945 general election; the party went on to win the election by a landslide over Winston Churchill's Conservative government. However, the newspaper reverted to the Tories for the next election five years later. It supported the Conservatives for the subsequent three elections, followed by support for both the Conservatives and the Liberal Party for the next five elections, expressly supporting a Con-Lib coalition in 1974. The paper then backed the Conservatives solidly until 2001.
For the 2001 general election The Times declared its support for Tony Blair's Labour government, which was re-elected by a landslide. It supported Labour again in 2005, when Labour achieved a third successive win, though with a reduced majority.[32] For the 2010 general election, however, the newspaper declared its support for the Tories once again; the election ended in the Tories taking the most votes and seats but having to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in order to form a government as they had failed to gain an overall majority.[33]
This makes it the most varied newspaper in terms of political support in British history.[34]
| Editor's name[35] | Years |
|---|---|
| John Walter | 1785–1803 |
| John Walter, 2nd | 1803–1812 |
| John Stoddart | 1812–1816 |
| Thomas Barnes | 1817–1841 |
| John Delane | 1841–1877 |
| Thomas Chenery | 1877–1884 |
| George Earle Buckle | 1884–1912 |
| George Geoffrey Dawson | 1912–1919 |
| Henry Wickham Steed | 1919–1922 |
| George Geoffrey Dawson | 1923–1941 |
| Robert McGowan Barrington-Ward | 1941–1948 |
| William Francis Casey | 1948–1952 |
| William Haley | 1952–1966 |
| William Rees-Mogg | 1967–1981 |
| Harold Evans | 1981–1982 |
| Charles Douglas-Home | 1982–1985 |
| Charles Wilson | 1985–1990 |
| Simon Jenkins | 1990–1992 |
| Peter Stothard | 1992–2002 |
| Robert Thomson | 2002–2007 |
| James Harding | 2007– |
(Times Books Group Ltd)
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