Newspaper publication is dominated by the national press. Nearly 80% of all households buy a copy of one of the main papers every day. There are more than eighty local and regional papers; but the total circulation of all of them together is much less than the combined circulation of the national dailies.
Most local papers do not appear on Sundays, so on that day the dominance of the national press is absolute. The Sunday papers are called so because that is the only day on which they appear. Some of them are sisters of a daily (published by the same company) but employing separate editors and journalists.
The morning newspaper 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 paper delivered to their door by a teenager who gets up at around half-past five every day in order to earn a bit of extra pocket money.
