Media UK

Newspapers in the UK: An introduction

By James Cridland

This article first appeared on December 7, 2004

How many national newspapers? To a typical American, we're unusual in having more than just a few national newspapers. To a Frenchman, they can't understand why we don't have a national evening paper, like Le Monde. Read on for more information...

Because of the small geographical area of the UK, and the good travel infrastructure, there are many national newspapers - unlike the United States, where most newspapers are printed and published locally. Unlike France, the main national papers are morning newspapers; indeed, there are no national evening titles.

UK newspapers are generally grouped into three, rather historical, groups - mass market tabloids, or red-tops (eg The Sun), middle-market tabloids (eg the Daily Mail), and quality broadsheets (eg The Times). Unlike other European countries, there are no daily all-sport newspapers.

Tabloid? Broadsheet?
In October 2003, quality broadsheet The Independent began producing what it preferred to call a compact edition - tabloid sized - along with the main broadsheet sized newspaper. This had a stunning effect on circulation - sales went up by 20% year-on-year - and The Times followed suit launching its own compact edition. Both newspapers are now exclusively available in compact form.

The Guardian, which denounced the original shift to compact - before planning and then junking its own compact format - is now thought to be switching to a mid-size format between tabloid and broadsheet, known as the 'Berliner'. This format is also possibly to be used by The Daily Telegraph, though their ownership changes have caused a delay in their adoption.

Political leanings
The two most-popular newspapers are The Sun and The Daily Mirror. Bitter rivals, the papers until recently held very differing political views - The Sun being Conservative (right-wing) since the early 70’s, while The Mirror being Labour (left-wing). Both now appear to support Labour. Historically, The Sun appears to support the current government.

Sex!
With the mass-market tabloids, just as in other areas of life, sex sells. The Sun is home of the famous Page Three girl - an idea used by The Mirror for a while, but dumped in the 1980s. The Daily Star, a sister paper for the Daily Express (originally launched to use spare capacity in the Express printing presses), gives its readers regular “StarBirds” throughout its pages and the advertising catch-phrase “Oooh Ahhh Daily Star” (and is, incidentally, a relative success in comparison to the Express). A relative newcomer, the Manchester-based Daily Sport, is closely linked with the pornography industry, and consists mainly of a diet of fanciful stories, any stories or trials connected to sex, and a diet of nude women on almost every page, although no pubic hair is shown. Advertising seems to consist of sex products and services.

Middle-market tabloids
The middle-market tabloids, the Daily Mail and The Daily Express are (possibly thankfully) concerned with a very different readership - that of affluent women. Weekend supplements and carefully-placed sponsorship ensure that these titles are a cheap alternative to a magazine, while sports supplements aimed at the husband aim to broaden their readership. The Daily Mail has a staunch right-wing agenda, and is lampooned by some for their over alarmist headlines, particularly about political asylum seekers. However, its formula, said by former owner Lord Northcliffe to give his readers a "daily hate", has made the Daily Mail one of the most popular newspapers in the UK.

The quality broadsheets - and quality compacts
The broadsheets are probably the most famous to readers overseas. The Times, the UK’s oldest national newspaper, is not the most popular - that accolade falls to the Daily Telegraph, known affectionately as the Daily Torygraph because of the staunch support to the Conservative Party. The Independent and The Guardian, together with financial newspaper The Financial Times (which, incidentally, is not related to The Times in any way), make up the rest of the broadsheets. It’s important to notice, though, that the mass-market tabloids sell up to four times as many copies as the broadsheets - and if you’re looking in vain for “The London Times", such a newspaper title has never, in fact, existed - The Times has always been a national newspaper. The Guardian, once based in Manchester, was known as The Manchester Guardian until the sixties.

The Fleet Street revolution
Newspaper publishing in the UK underwent a revolution in the mid 1980s, fuelled by the launch of Eddie Shah’s middle-market Today newspaper. Freed of the out-dated practices of the print unions, this, the UK’s first colour newspaper, threatened the established newspapers by using computers almost exclusively to typeset and print the paper. In this way, a newspaper could survive with a far lower readership, because it was simply cheaper to produce. The launch was not without its faults - problems with colour printing led to the title being lampooned on the satirical TV programme ‘Spitting Image’ as being printed in “Shah-vision", while the first edition’s front page, a full-colour picture of the Queen on tour abroad, was nearly two hours late, making distribution of the paper a nightmare. The middle-market “Today” wasn’t a hit with advertisers and conservative readers, and, swallowed by Murdoch’s News International empire within two years, it was closed in 1995. However, its legacy lives on to this day.

Fleet Street in London, for years the home of the British press, is now deserted by publishers. The revolution in work practices coincided with expansion in the once-derelict East London Docklands, reinvented as a centre for business. News International titles The Times and The Sun moved to purpose-built buildings in Wapping, in the East End of London. The “re-engineering” of the titles’ production was acrimonious, with many people being made redundant; the Wapping plant was picketed for a long while afterwards. The Daily Telegraph, along with The Independent and The Mirror, moved into Canary Wharf (properly known as 1 Canada Square), the centre-piece of the Docklands and one of the highest buildings in the world.

A trip down Fleet Street these days is still worthwhile; the art-deco Express building still stands, and is a shining example of 1920s architecture. Near it is the old Daily Telegraph building, still suitably adorned with its former owner’s name, and still also including the alleyway to Peterborough Court, the place that gave its name to the recently-disappeared humorous gossip column in the paper.

The free newspapers
A relatively recent phenomenon in the newspaper industry has been the free morning papers. Free weekly papers are fairly common, supported by advertising and carrying little in the way of editorial. But now, with the launch of Associated's “Metro” in London, Birmingham and Leeds, a sister paper called “News” in Manchester, plus Manchester’s own “Metro News” and similar titles in Tyneside, Edinburgh and Glasgow, these newspapers thrive on public transport and in busy cities. Giving editorial almost as good as the paid-for dailies, are these a threat to the established titles? The Metro is a canny operation - in London, it’s deliberately difficult to get hold of a Metro after 9.00am, to avoid causing sales problems with Associated’s Evening Standard later in the day. In the author’s tube station, supplies run out at around 7.50am.

The future
Consolidation seems one of the ways forward. The Times and The Sun’s parent company also owns Sky television, the UK’s satellite television service. The Guardian group now owns the Jazz FM and Real Radio radio stations, as well as probably the biggest internet presence for a newspaper. On a local scale, the Kent Messenger group also owns the local KMfm radio stations in many areas of Kent, and agressively cross-promotes them.

New sizes and formats may arrest the decline of newspaper buying. In June 2004, newspaper sales were declining year-by-year by 4.7% - the only increases worldwide, in fact, coming in developing countries. However, reductions in size for some of the newspapers has meant an increase in circulation, albeit arguably a temporary one. And, while newspaper sales have been slowly declining, consumption of news can be claimed to have vastly increased: whether from the internet, or one of the eight non-stop news channels available to UK viewers.

Newspaper companies own content. The best way of consumption of this content at present is on small sheets of dead, pulped, reformed, wood. It requires no recharging; losing a newspaper is not a major problem; and delivery and availablity is easy. However, some newspapers are experimenting in delivery of the printed newspaper by the internet - you download a PDF instead of picking up a printed paper. All national papers now have their own websites; some are shifting classified advertising away from the printed paper. Content is a useful commodity - and the way this is presented in the future may well change. The cleverest newspapers will adapt to use their content in different ways.

James Cridland worked for Emap Radio for a total of ten and a half years, before disappearing in a puff of new media smoke. He's won over ten international advertising awards, which he keeps in his loo. He's now Head of New Media for Virgin Radio. He has a little pussy cat.
Notice: Undefined variable: author in /var/www/html/jrc/new.mediauk.com/content/article.muk on line 42
| E-mail
Notice: Undefined variable: www in /var/www/html/jrc/new.mediauk.com/content/article.muk on line 47