UK and US Top-Selling Newspapers

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UK Newspaper History

1. The Sun in 1964 (NewsCorp) from the Daily Herald 1912 - 1964 (Labour Party)
2. Daily Mail 1896 (DMG Media) — right-leaning. Devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), it 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. Became known as a "newspaper for women".
3. The Guardian — mainstream left — was founded in Manchester in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London
   • In 1993 it purchased The Observer, a weekly Sunday paper famous for its weekly colour magazine supplement, first published in 1964, about $15.00 - $25.00 by airmail into Australia at select newsagents

The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. The Times and its sister paper, The Sunday Times (founded in 1821), are published by Times Media, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times were founded independently and have had common ownership since 1966.

• The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to The Times, becoming a separately paid-for weekly literature and society magazine in 1914.
• In 1971 The Times began publishing the Times Higher Education Supplement (now known as the Times Higher Education) which focuses its coverage on tertiary education. In 2004 it issued its first annual World University Rankings.

The Daily Telegraph was founded by army officer, Arthur B. Sleigh on 29 Jun 1855 as a conservative paper, for 2d, initially moderately liberal, until 1870s. Joseph Moses Levy the owner of The Sunday Times agreed to print the newspaper. When Sleigh was unable to pay his printing bill a few months later, Levy took over the newspaper.

US Newspaper History

1. New York Times was founded in 1851 as New-York Daily Times by two New York Tribune journalists Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, a popular conservative newspaper. In August 1896, Chattanooga Times publisher Adolph Ochs acquired The New-York Times, implementing significant alterations to the newspaper's structure, establishing it as a merchant's newspaper and removing the hyphen from the newspaper's name. In 1905, The New York Times opened Times Tower, marking expansion. In April 1935, Ochs died, leaving his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger as publisher. Today Arthur's great-grandson, also called Arthur, is chairman and publisher.
2. The Wall Street Journal
   A predecessor to The Wall Street Journal was the Kiernan News Agency founded by John J. Kiernan in 1869. In 1880, Kiernan hired Charles H. Dow and Edward D. Jones as reporters. They co-founded their own news service, Dow Jones and Company, with fellow Kiernan reporter Charles Bergstresser. Dow Jones was headquartered in the basement of 15 Wall Street, the same building as Kiernan's company next to the New York Stock Exchange Building. In 1883, their brief news bulletins were aggregated in a printed daily summary called the Customers' Afternoon Letter and sold for $1.50 per month. Beginning July 8, 1889, the Afternoon Letter was renamed The Wall Street Journal, initially 4 pages long, with a cost of $0.02 per copy.

   Before his death in 1902, Dow arranged to sell Dow Jones and the Journal to Clarence W. Barron, the Boston correspondent for the Journal, who subsequently passed it on in 1928 via his step-daughter's husband, Hugh Bancroft to the reclusive Boston Bancroft family. In 2007 it was purchased by Newscorp.

3. The Washington Post
   The Post was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled financially and editorially. In 1933, financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy and revived its health and reputation; his successors Katharine and Phil Graham, Meyer's daughter and son-in-law, bought out several rival publications and continued this work. The Post's 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the investigation into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee, which developed into the Watergate scandal and the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. In October 2013, the Graham family sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a holding company owned by Jeff Bezos, for US$250 million.
4. USA Today was launched in 1982 by Al Neuharth, company chairman, initially in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. metropolitan areas for a newsstand price of 25¢. The parent company, previously known as Gannett, was founded in New York in 1923 by Frank Gannett. The company renamed to USA Today in November 2025.

   Beyond their flagship national publication, the broader publishing portfolio of USA Today's parent company includes:

   • Daily Newspapers: 85 titles across the country (including the flagship USA Today).
   • Non-Daily Publications: Nearly 1,000 community and weekly publications.
   • Sister Publications: Since 1999, the company also owns Newsquest, a massive publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom

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