Keeping in shape is about the size of it

When 'The Times' went fully compact last year - and risked alienating traditionalists - it was delighted to tell them that the size of the 2004 version of the paper was very close to what it had been when it launched in 1785. Changes in size have been a feature of newspaper history in the 220 years since. When the 'Daily Mirror' started life in 1903 it was what would now be called a Berliner - somewhere between a broadsheet and a tabloid. 'The Sun' was a broadsheet when it launched in 1964, going tabloid under Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Britain's oldest tabloid was the 'Daily Sketch', founded in 1909, and it went on to play an important role in one of the most significant size-changes of the modern newspaper era when the 'Daily Mail' switched from broadsheet to tabloid in May 1971 ( last broadsheet edition, above). It was all part of a revolution at Associated Newspapers that saw the closure of the 'Sketch', hundreds of redundancies and the arrival from the 'Sketch' of David English as editor of the

When 'The Times' went fully compact last year - and risked alienating traditionalists - it was delighted to tell them that the size of the 2004 version of the paper was very close to what it had been when it launched in 1785. Changes in size have been a feature of newspaper history in the 220 years since. When the 'Daily Mirror' started life in 1903 it was what would now be called a Berliner - somewhere between a broadsheet and a tabloid. 'The Sun' was a broadsheet when it launched in 1964, going tabloid under Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Britain's oldest tabloid was the 'Daily Sketch', founded in 1909, and it went on to play an important role in one of the most significant size-changes of the modern newspaper era when the 'Daily Mail' switched from broadsheet to tabloid in May 1971. It was all part of a revolution at Associated Newspapers that saw the closure of the 'Sketch', hundreds of redundancies and the arrival from the 'Sketch' of David English as editor of the 'Mail'. "We were going nowhere until English came along and turned us into a tabloid," recalls veteran 'Mail' writer Ian Wooldridge. "He was a genius." It took the broad-sheet 'Daily Express' until January 1977 to go tabloid. But by then English was well on the way to establishing the middle-market pre-eminence that the 'Mail' still enjoys today, and to becoming a legend among editors.