The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. The Times and its sister paper, The Sunday Times (founded in 1821), are published by Times Media, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times were founded independently and have had common ownership since 1966. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.
The Times was the first newspaper to bear that name, inspiring numerous other papers around the world. In countries where these other titles are popular, it has been referred to as The London Times or The Times of London, although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution.
The Times had an average daily circulation of 365,880 in March 2020; in the same period, The Sunday Times had an average weekly circulation of 647,622. They also have 640,000 digital-only paid subscribers as of June 2025, with the number rising to 740,000 when including physical circulation paid subscribers. In the year June 2024 to June 2025, Times Media, the parent company of The Times and Sunday Times newspapers saw pre-tax profits rise +13% to £69.2 million ($92.7 million), operating profits of £73.3 million ($102.2 million) and revenues rising +2% to £390.7 million ($523.5 million). An American edition of The Times has been published since 6 June 2006 with it mainly being circulated in the New York City and Washington, D.C. metro areas. A complete historical file of the digitised paper, up to 2019, is available online from Gale Cengage Learning. The Times and The Sunday Times launched their own radio station, Times Radio, in 2020; its shows cover news and politics, both nationally and internationally, and had an average weekly reach of 604,000 listeners at the end of 2024.
The Times was founded by John Walter (1738–1812) on 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, with Walter in the role of editor. Walter had lost his job by the end of 1784 after the insurance company for which he worked went bankrupt due to losses from a Jamaican hurricane. Unemployed, Walter began a new business venture. At that time, Henry Johnson invented logography, a typesetting system that promised to be faster and more accurate by including sorts for common words and groups of letters (although three years later, it was proved less efficient than advertised); Walter bought the patent and opened a printing house to produce books by this method. The first publication of The Daily Universal Register was on 1 January 1785. Walter changed the title after 940 editions on 1 January 1788 to The Times. In 1803 Walter handed ownership and editorship to his son John. The senior Walter's pioneering efforts to obtain continental news, especially from France, helped to build the paper's reputation among policymakers and financiers, in spite of a sixteen-month incarceration in Newgate Prison for libels printed in The Times.
The Times used contributions from significant figures in the fields of politics, science, literature, and the arts to build its reputation. For much of its early life, the profits of The Times were very large and the competition minimal, so it could pay far better than its rivals for information or writers. Beginning in 1814, the paper was printed on the new steam-driven cylinder press developed by Friedrich Koenig (1774–1833). In 1815, The Times had a circulation of 5,000. It had grown to 9,800 by 1837 and was 51,200 in 1854.
Thomas Barnes was appointed general editor in 1817. In the same year, the paper's printer, James Lawson, died and passed the business onto his son, John Joseph Lawson (1802–1852). Under the editorship of Barnes and his successor in 1841, John Thadeus Delane, the influence of The Times rose to great heights, especially in politics and amongst the City of London. Peter Fraser and Edward Sterling were two noted journalists, and gained for The Times the pompous/satirical nickname 'The Thunderer' (from "We thundered out the other day an article on social and political reform"). The increased circulation and influence of the paper were based in part to its early adoption of the steam-driven rotary printing press. Distribution via steam trains to rapidly growing concentrations of urban populations helped ensure the profitability of the paper and its growing influence.
The Times was one of the first newspapers to send war correspondents to cover particular conflicts. William Howard Russell, the paper's correspondent with the army in the Crimean War, was immensely influential with his dispatches back to England.
The Times faced financial failure in 1890 under Arthur Fraser Walter, but it was rescued by an energetic editor, Charles Frederic Moberly Bell. During his tenure (1890–1911), The Times became associated with selling the Encyclopædia Britannica using aggressive American marketing methods introduced by Horace Everett Hooper and his advertising executive, Henry Haxton. Due to legal fights between the Britannica's two owners, Hooper and Walter Montgomery Jackson, The Times severed its connection in 1908 and was bought by the pioneering newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe).
In editorials published on 29 and 31 July 1914, Wickham Steed, the Times's Chief Editor, argued that the British Empire should enter the Great War. On 8 May 1920, also under the editorship of Steed, The Times, in an editorial, endorsed the antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as a genuine document, and called Jews the world's greatest danger. In the leader entitled "The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry", Steed wrote about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: "What are these 'Protocols'? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? Are they forgery? If so, whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in part fulfilled, in part so far gone in the way of fulfillment?" The following year, when Philip Graves, The Times' correspondent for Constantinople (modern Istanbul), exposed The Protocols as a forgery, The Times retracted the editorial of the previous year.
In 1922 John Jacob Astor, son of the 1st Viscount Astor, bought The Times from the Northcliffe estate. The paper gained a measure of notoriety in the 1930s with its advocacy of German appeasement; the editor Geoffrey Dawson was closely allied with government supporters of appeasement, most notably Neville Chamberlain. Candid news reports by Norman Ebbut from Berlin that warned of Nazi warmongering were rewritten in London to support the appeasement policy.
Kim Philby, a double agent with primary allegiance to the Soviet Union, was a correspondent for the newspaper in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Philby was admired for his courage in obtaining high-quality reporting from the front lines of the bloody conflict. He later joined British Military Intelligence (MI6) during the Second World War, was promoted into senior positions after the war ended, and defected to the Soviet Union when discovery was inevitable in 1963.
Between 1941 and 1946, the left-wing British historian E. H. Carr was assistant editor. Carr was well known for the strongly pro-Soviet tone of his editorials. In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens between the Greek Communist ELAS and the British Army, Carr in a Times leader sided with the Communists, leading Winston Churchill to condemn him and the article in a speech to the House of Commons. As a result of Carr's editorial, The Times became popularly known during that stage of the Second World War as "the threepenny Daily Worker" (the price of the Communist Party's Daily Worker being one penny).
On 3 May 1966 it resumed printing news on the front page; previously, the front page had been given over to small advertisements, usually of interest to the moneyed classes in British society. Also in 1966, the Royal Arms, which had been a feature of the newspaper's masthead since its inception, was abandoned. In the same year, members of the Astor family sold the paper to the Canadian publishing magnate Roy Thomson. His Thomson Corporation brought it under the same ownership as The Sunday Times to form Times Newspapers Limited.