Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a press baron, the last in fact of the hereditary grandees who once dominated the

British newspaper industry. He went to Eton, which he didn't much care for, joined

the army in the war where he wasn't considered officer material and joined the family

firm in 1951.

He's been there ever since and as other newspaper owners fell victim to change, he prospered.

His titles have gone from strength to

strength and he now presides over the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, London's

Evening Standard and a string of regional papers. He is the chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust,

via Hormsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere. Well that's an introduction that begs one simple question,

Lord Rothermere. How did you do it? Why have you succeeded where others have

failed or are failing?

Well I understand newspapers and I understand newspapers in depth and I have a great love of them.

It's a consuming passion is it?

Oh yes I adore them and also I love innovation I love new things I have some instinct for what is going to happen

I have always had an ability to see into the future and I have an extraordinary rapport with what

will go down with the public. But when you took over in 1971, the national

papers that your family owned, the family silver really, was

was teaching on the brink of extinction, wasn't it? This has been the great achievement because your

daily mail was outsold and outsmarted completely by the Daily Express and today the

opposite is the case. I remember the occasion very, very well, never forget it.

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