Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Times newspaper was first published on the 1st of January 1785 under the name The Daily Universal Register. John Walter launched the publication after losing his job as an insurance employee following a Jamaican hurricane. The title was changed to The Times on the 1st of January 1788 after 940 editions.
William Howard Russell served as the war correspondent for The Times during the Crimean War. His dispatches were so influential that they helped shape public opinion and policy back in England. This reporting practice established The Times as one of the first newspapers to send war correspondents to cover specific conflicts.
Rupert Murdoch acquired The Times and The Sunday Times from the Thomson Corporation in 1981. The acquisition followed three weeks of intensive bargaining with unions by company negotiators John Collier and Bill O'Neill. This era marked the end of the hot-metal Linotype printing process and its replacement by computer input and photocomposition.
The Times is the originator of the widely used Times New Roman typeface which made its debut in the issue of the 3rd of October 1932. Stanley Morison of The Times collaborated with Monotype Imaging to develop the typeface for legibility in low-tech printing. Victor Lardent created the typeface under Morison's supervision using Plantin as the basis for his design.
The Times had 600,000 digital-only paid subscribers as of September 2024. The paper has recovered from a dramatic drop in website visits after introducing a paywall in October 2010. The times.com site had a readership of 103 million in November 2024.