The Times

• 1. Introduction

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  The Times of London has been arriving on breakfast tables, shaping prime ministers, and sparking controversy since the 1st of January 1785. It began not as The Times at all, but as something called The Daily Universal Register, a name that belonged to the paper for exactly 940 editions. Then, on the 1st of January 1788, it became The Times, a name so powerful and so widely imitated that readers in countries with their own papers called Times have had to specify "The London Times" to mean this one.

  Its founder, John Walter, was not a journalist by training. He was a businessman who had just watched his employer's insurance company collapse after losses from a Jamaican hurricane. Unemployed and looking for a new direction, he bought the patent for an experimental printing technology called logography, opened a printing house, and launched a newspaper almost as an afterthought. Three years later, the logography was proved less efficient than advertised. Walter kept the newspaper.

  What follows is the story of how that accidental paper became what historians have called indispensable, what George Orwell imagined being twisted into a tool of totalitarian control, and what James Bond read every morning instead of anything American.

• 2. The Paper and the Press

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  From 1814 onward, The Times printed on a steam-driven cylinder press developed by Friedrich Koenig. That single technological decision separated the paper from virtually every competitor in Britain. Steam printing allowed editions to reach readers faster, in larger quantities, and with a quality that hand presses could not match.

  By 1815 the paper's circulation stood at 5,000. By 1837 it had nearly doubled, reaching 9,800. By 1854 it had crossed 51,200, a tenfold increase in fewer than four decades. Distribution via steam trains to rapidly growing urban populations amplified the effect. The paper could be loaded onto trains in London and be read in Manchester or Birmingham the same morning.

  Thomas Barnes took over as general editor in 1817, and his tenure, followed by John Thadeus Delane from 1841, pushed the paper's political influence to heights no British newspaper had previously reached. Critics and allies alike took to calling it The Thunderer, a nickname that traced back to a boast in one of its own articles: "We thundered out the other day an article on social and political reform." The phrase was satirical when first applied, but it stuck, because it was accurate.

  The Times was one of the first newspapers anywhere to send its own correspondents to cover wars. William Howard Russell's dispatches from the Crimean War reached readers in England with a directness and detail that official communiques never provided, and his reports from the front were immensely influential.

• 3. Ownership and Power

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  For the first two decades of its life, The Times stayed within the Walter family. John Walter founded it, and in 1803 he handed the paper to his son John, who passed it in turn to the next generation. That line of succession held until 1894, when Arthur Fraser Walter inherited a paper that was in serious financial trouble.

  The rescue came from Charles Frederic Moberly Bell, an energetic editor whose tenure ran from 1890 to 1911. Bell's strategy included something unexpected: aggressive marketing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica using methods introduced by an American businessman named Horace Everett Hooper. Legal disputes between the Britannica's two owners eventually forced The Times to sever that relationship in 1908, and the paper was sold to Alfred Harmsworth, who later became Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe's was the first of several ownership transfers that would define the paper's character in the twentieth century.

  In 1922 John Jacob Astor, son of the 1st Viscount Astor, bought The Times from Northcliffe's estate. The Astor family held it until 1966, when they sold to the Canadian publishing magnate Roy Thomson. Thomson brought The Times under the same ownership as The Sunday Times for the first time, forming Times Newspapers Limited.

  An industrial dispute closed the paper entirely from the 1st of December 1978 to the 12th of November 1979, nearly a full year. When the Thomson Corporation struggled to sustain both titles through the 1979 energy crisis and union pressures, it sought a buyer. Several approached, including Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, and Lord Rothermere. Only one could meet the full terms: the Australian business magnate Rupert Murdoch, who completed the purchase in 1981. The paper has remained under News UK, a News Corp subsidiary, ever since.

• 4. Controversies on the Record

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  On the 8th of May 1920, under editor Wickham Steed, The Times published an editorial endorsing The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a genuine document and described Jews as the world's greatest danger. In the editorial, Steed raised the rhetorical question of whether the Protocols were authentic or forged, suggesting the document's apparent accuracy in predicting events made its origins unclear. The following year, Philip Graves, The Times's own correspondent in Constantinople, exposed the Protocols as a forgery, and the paper retracted the 1920 editorial.

  In the 1930s, editor Geoffrey Dawson was closely allied with government supporters of the policy of appeasing Nazi Germany, most notably Neville Chamberlain. Norman Ebbut filed candid reports from Berlin warning of Nazi warmongering, and those reports were rewritten in London to bring them into line with the appeasement position.

  Kim Philby, who covered the Spanish Civil War for the paper in the late 1930s, was later revealed to be a Soviet double agent. He was admired at The Times for courage under fire. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 when discovery became inevitable.

  In December 1944, assistant editor E. H. Carr wrote a Times leader siding with the Greek Communist ELAS during fighting in Athens against the British Army. Winston Churchill condemned both Carr and the article in a speech to the House of Commons, and the paper earned the mocking nickname "the threepenny Daily Worker" for a time.

  More recently, IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, upheld multiple complaints against The Times in 2019, including one involving a defamation claim brought by Imam Abdullah Patel. A separate complaint from Sultan Choudhury, whose photograph was placed alongside a headline in a way that implied he had made a statement he had not, was also upheld in 2020, resulting in an apology and damages. In December 2020, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg and the group Cage received damages of £30,000 plus costs in a libel case against the paper.

• 5. The Typeface That Spread Everywhere

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  Stanley Morison wrote an article criticising The Times for being badly printed and typographically antiquated. That critique led directly to one of the most widely used typefaces in the world. In 1931 The Times commissioned a new serif typeface from Victor Lardent, an artist working in the newspaper's own advertising department, under Morison's direction. Lardent based the design partly on an older typeface called Plantin, but adjusted it substantially for legibility and space economy.

  Times New Roman made its first appearance in the issue of the 3rd of October 1932. After a single year in use at the newspaper, the design was released for commercial sale, and it spread far beyond Fleet Street.

  The Times held on to Times New Roman for 40 years, but changes in printing technology and the shift from broadsheet to tabloid format in 2004 pushed the paper to switch typefaces five times after 1972. Every successor has been a variant of the original design. Times Europa arrived in 1972, designed by Walter Tracy for faster printing presses. Times Roman replaced it in 1982. Times Millennium followed in 1991. Times Classic appeared in 2001. Times Modern was unveiled on the 20th of November 2006, designed with 45-degree angled bracket serifs for legibility at smaller sizes, with Neville Brody leading the design work.

  The paper was printed in broadsheet format for 219 years before switching to tabloid, or compact, size in November 2004, a decision aimed partly at attracting younger readers and commuters using public transport.

• 6. Political Allegiances

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  Historian Allan Nevins wrote in 1959 that for more than a century The Times had been an integral part of the political structure of Great Britain, with its editors maintaining close touch with 10 Downing Street. That observation captures both the paper's influence and the complicated relationship it has always had with British political parties.

  For much of the twentieth century, The Times backed the Conservative Party, with interruptions. At the 1945 general election it took what one observer called a peculiarly detached stance, criticising the Conservative campaign without endorsing any alternative. It reverted to Conservative support in 1950 and maintained that broadly through to 1997, when it declined to endorse any party but supported specific Eurosceptic candidates instead.

  In 2001 and again in 2005, The Times declared support for Tony Blair's Labour government. By 2010 it had swung back to the Conservatives. In 2024 it declined to endorse any party, publishing a leader article stating that Labour had been "sparing with the truth about what it will do in office" and therefore "cannot expect an endorsement".

  Its changes in political alignment over its history have led some to describe The Times as the most varied newspaper in terms of political support of any in British history. A 2004 MORI survey of the voting intentions of Times readers found them split across Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Labour preferences, with no single party commanding an outright majority.

• 7. The Digital Pivot

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  The Times and The Sunday Times established an online presence in 1996. The sites initially attracted millions of readers, but in July 2010 News UK introduced a paywall requiring non-subscribers to pay to read either paper online. Within one month of the paywall's introduction in October 2010, unique monthly visitors fell from 21 million to 2.7 million, a drop of 87 percent.

  The papers chose depth over reach. By October 2011, around 111,000 people subscribed to the digital products. That number had grown to 600,000 digital subscribers by September 2024. As of June 2025, The Times and The Sunday Times together count 640,000 digital-only paid subscribers, rising to 740,000 when print subscribers who also have digital access are included.

  In the financial year from June 2024 to June 2025, Times Media reported revenues of £390.7 million, with pre-tax profits of £69.2 million, up 13 percent on the prior year. By November 2024, thetimes.com recorded a readership of 103 million.

  The Times and The Sunday Times also launched a radio station, Times Radio, in 2020. By the end of 2024 it had an average weekly reach of 604,000 listeners. A Reuters Institute survey in 2024 ranked The Times ninth for trust out of 15 outlets polled. An American edition, distributed mainly in the New York City and Washington D.C. metro areas, has been published since the 6th of June 2006.