The Daily Telegraph, known online as The Telegraph, is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as Daily Telegraph & Courier. The Telegraph has been described as a newspaper of record and has generally had an international reputation for quality, having been described by Amol Rajan as "one of the world's great titles". Bias assessment platform Allsides classifies the paper as leaning right. It was fined £30,000 in 2015 for "sending an unsolicited email to hundreds of thousands of its subscribers, urging them to vote for the Conservatives." The paper's motto, "Was, is, and will be", appears in the editorial pages and has featured in every edition of the newspaper since 19 April 1858. The paper had a circulation of 363,183 in December 2018, having declined following industry trends from 1.4 million in 1980. Its sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, which started in 1961, had a circulation of 281,025 as of December 2018. The Telegraph has the largest circulation for a broadsheet newspaper in the UK and the sixth largest circulation of any UK newspaper as of 2016. The two sister newspapers are run separately, with different editorial staff, but there is cross-usage of stories. Articles published in either may be published on the Telegraph Media Group's www.telegraph.co.uk website, under the title of The Telegraph. The Telegraph has been the first newspaper to report on a number of notable news scoops, including the 2009 MP expenses scandal, which led to a number of high-profile political resignations and for which it was named 2009 British Newspaper of the Year, and its 2016 undercover investigation on the England football manager Sam Allardyce. However, critics, including the paper's former chief political commentator Peter Oborne, accuse it of being unduly influenced by advertisers, especially HSBC. Former columnist Graham Norton called it "toxic" and "a mouthpiece for Boris Johnson" published with "no fact-checking at all". It was reported on 26 October 2019 that the owners of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph were to put both titles up for sale following diminishing profit and circulation, after rumours of a sale had been denied for several years.