Ownership

The mail was originally a broadsheet, but it was then switched to a compact formal, in 1971. The paper has a circulation of around two million, which is the fourth largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper in the world. The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It was a cost halfpenny at a time when 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 which rose to 500,000 in 1899. 



The Guardian, which was originally published as the Manchester Guardian, was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen. They launched their paper after the police closure of the one radicalManchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group (GMG) of newspapers, radio stations and print media including; The Observer Sunday newspaper, the Guardian Weekly international newspaper, and new media—Guardian Abroad website, and guardian.co.uk. All aforementioned were owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation existing between 1936 and 2008, which aimed to ensure the paper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it did not become vulnerable to take overs by for-profit media groups. At the beginning of October 2008, the Scott Trust's assets were transferred to a new limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, with the intention being that the original trust would be wound up. Dame Liz Forgan,  chair of the Scott Trust, reassured staff that the purposes of the new company remained the same as under the previous arrangements. 



The Sun is a tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Since The Sun on Sunday was launched in February 2012, the paper has been a seven-day operation. As a broadcast, it was founded in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald; it became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased by its current owners. It was published by the News Group Newspapers division of News UK, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The Sun has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United Kingdom, but in late 2013 slipped to second largest Saturday newspaper behind the Daily Mail. It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014. 

The Independent is a British online newspaper. Established in 1986 as an independent national morning newspaper published in London, it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News and Media from 1997 until it was sold to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010. The last printed edition of The Independent was published Saturday 20 March 2016, leaving only its digital editions. Nicknamed the Indy. it began as a broadsheet, but changed to tabloid (compact) format in 2003. Until September 2011, the paper described itself on the banner at the top of every newspaper as "free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influences". It tends to take a pro-market stance on economic issues.