THE PRESS

Britain’s first newspapers appeared over 300 years ago. Now, as then, newspapers receive no government subsidy, unlike in some other European countries today. Advertising has always been a vital source of income. As long ago as 1660, King Charles II advertised in a newspaper for his lost dog. Today, income from advertising is as critical as income from sales. In 1995, for example £5,465 million was spent on press advertising, making the press by far the largest advertising medium in Britain.

There are approximately 130 daily and Sunday papers, 1,400 weekly papers and over 6,500 periodical publications. More newspapers, proportionately, are sold in Britain than in almost any other country. On average, two out of three people over the age of 15 read a national morning newspaper. National newspapers have a circulation of about 13 million on weekdays and 17 million on Sundays, but the readership is twice this figure. At first glance, therefore, the British press seems to be in good health.

Newspaper publication is dominated by the national press, which is an indication of the comparative weakness of regional identity in Britain. Nearly 80% of all households buy a copy of one of the main national papers every day. There are more than eighty local and regional daily papers; but the total circulation of all of them together is much less than the combined circulation of the national ‘dailies’. The only non-national papers with significant circulations are published in the evenings, when they do not compete with the national papers, which always appear in the mornings.

Most local papers do not appear on Sundays, so on that day the dominance of the national press is absolute. The ‘Sunday papers’ are so-called because that is the only day on which they appear. Some of them are sisters of all dailies (published by the same company) but employing separate editors and journalists.

The morning paper is a British household institution; such an important one that, until the laws were relaxed in the early 1990s, newsagents` were the only shops that were allowed to open on Sundays. People could not be expected to do without their newspapers for even one day, especially a day when there was more free time to read them. The Sunday papers sell slightly more copies than the national dailies and are thicker. Some of them have six or more sections making up a total of well over 200 pages.

Another indication of the importance of ‘the papers’ is the morning ‘ paper round’. Most newsagents organize these, and more than half of the country’s readers get their morning papers delivered to their door by a teenager who gets at around half-past five every day in order to earn a bit of extra pocket money.

The national newspapers, both on weekdays and Sundays, fall into two broad categories: the ‘ quality press’ (or ‘ broadsheets’), which caters for the better educated readers, and ‘ popular press’ (or ‘ tabloids’), which contains far less print than the broadsheets and far more pictures. Tabloids use larger headlines and write in a simpler style of English. While the broadsheets devote much space to politics and other ‘serious’ news, the tabloids concentrate on ‘human interest’ stories, which often means sex and scandal.

However, the broadsheets do not completely ignore sex and scandal or any other aspect of public life. Both types of paper devote equal amounts of attention to sport. The difference between them is in the treatment of the topics they cover, and in which topics are given the most prominence. The reason that the quality newspapers are called broadsheets and the popular ones tabloids is because they are different shapes. The broadsheets are twice as large as the tabloids.

In spite of the apparently light content of the tabloids, they appear to have if not more political influence than the broadsheets. Although television has taken over as the main news provider, the law prevents TV from taking sides in politics. So it is left to the newspapers to support parties and give interpretation of the news. None of the daily newspapers is actually run by the political parties, however. What counts for the newspaper publishers is business. All of them are in the business first and foremost to make money. Their primary concern is to sell as many copies as possible and to attract as much advertising as possible. They normally put selling copies ahead of political integrity.

The British press is controlled by a rather small number of extremely large multinational companies. Several newspapers are owned by companies controlled by individuals: there is a tradition of rich and powerful press barons (tycoons). Viscount Rothermere dominates The Mail, Lord Hollick, The Express. Some of these pressbarons are not English but from Commonwealth countries: Conrad Black of The Daily Telegraph is Canadian; Rupert Murdoch of The Sun is Australian. Actually, Murdoch’s multinational company, News Corporation, also owns The Times, The Sunday Times and News of the World; it also controls the satellite channel BskyB.

Britain has a substantial number of regional newspapers. Of these the two Scottish ones, The Scotsman (Edinburg) and the Herald (Glasgow) are the most important, since they are also national newspapers. But others with a large circulation include the Birmingham Evening Mail, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, the Birmingham Sunday Mercury, and the Leeds Yorkshire Post.

Britain’s ethnic minority communities also produce their own papers, both in English and in their vernacular languages. The oldest of these is the Jewish Chronicle, founded in 1841. But there are Asian, Caribbean and even Arabic newspapers published in Britain.

Finally, there are over 800 free newspapers, popularly known as ‘ freebies’, almost all of them are weekly and financed entirely by advertising. They achieve a weekly circulation of over 40 million.

The best-selling weeklies are those giving details of the forthcoming week’s television and radio programmes, What’s On TV, the Radio Times and TV Times, with circulation in 1996 of 1.6 million, 1.4 million and 1 million, respectively. Second to them in popularity are women’s magazines, of which easily the best-selling is Take a Break, and Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s Own, Woman, Woman’s Realm. During the early 1990s some recently established men’s magazines, Loaded, CQ and Esquire, became popular. The leading opinion journals are The Econimist, the New Statesman and Society, the Spectator and Private Eye.

With almost 1,500 staff in 91 countries, no newspaper anywhere can compete with Britain’s formidable news agency, Reuters. Across the world its name has become an assurance of objectivity, accuracy and reliability.