The newspaper was launched in 1903 by Alfred Harmsworth as a newspaper for women. However in this format it was unsuccessful and he quickly changed the focus and added pictures and photographs. This improved the circulation dramatically. The paper was later owned by Harold Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere, it was bought by Robert Maxwell in 1984, and is now owned by Trinity Mirror.

It takes a left-of-centre editorial line. Under its editor Piers Morgan, it was the only tabloid newspaper in the UK to be hostile to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

During the 1990s the paper was accused of dumbing-down in an attempt to poach readers from Rupert Murdoch's Sun, although judging by their relative sales figures this was unsuccessful. More recently the Mirror changed its logo from red to black (to try and dissociate the paper from the term "red top", meaning a sensationalist mass-market tabloid) and it has attempted to concentrate on solid journalism rather than celebrity scandals - not always successfully.

External links

• The Daily Mirror
• History of Trinity Mirror

The Daily Mirror was an afternoon paper in Sydney, Australia from 1941 until it merged with its morning sister paper The Daily Telegraph in 1990 to form The Daily Telegraph-Mirror, which in 1996 reverted to The Daily Telegraph, in the process removing the last vestige of the old Daily Mirror.