A Tabloid is Born!

Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie explores the origins of the tabloid newspaper at the dawn of the 20th Century, which began with the 1896 launch of the Daily Mail. The publisher was maverick opportunist Alfred Harmsworth, who realised that the Victorian broadsheets bored most ordinary Edwardians to death. The Mail would provide them with stories that would inform and entertain, featuring scandal, celebrities and murder. The Mail's targeting of female readers was copied by the Mirror, which relaunched as a 'pictoral' and became the country's biggest selling illustrated paper. These early days of the tabloid heralded the launch of the paparazzi, and the first debates about privacy and intrusion.