“This is a newspaper. It’s 90 percent bullshit, but it’s entertaining. That’s why I read it, because it entertains me.” – Alonzo Harris, Training Day
In the US, geographic spread and scale makes operating truly national newspapers a difficult proposition, and only three or four major titles are available throughout every nook and cranny of the country. But Britain is far more geographically compact, so nationwide newspapers are a far more viable proposition here; we have a dozen plus. Trashy tabloids dominate the market, but “respectable” paper (pseudo- and otherwise) also get a look in. Here’s a Yank’s guide to them. Pro tip: by the time you read this, Rupert Murdoch has probably bought out another one.
The unabashed tabloids
The favoured printed news source of the country as a whole, tabloids – noted for their compact size, “red tops” and focus on easy-to-understand journalism – are a big deal here in the UK. Combined, the three major tabloids sell nearly 4.5 million copies and are read by around 12 million people – a fifth of the country.
We’ll begin with The Sun (website), perhaps the least prestigious newspaper imaginable. Not coincidentally, it’s also the most widely-read newspaper in the UK: a circulation in the 2.5 million copies range, with around 7 million total readers. That’s more copies printed than any US paper, despite our population being only one-fifth of that of the US. At its peak in the late 1980s, it sold 4 million copies per issue. It’s published by News International, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, so you know you’re getting bias-free material. (As long as you feel center-right opinions are the only ones worth expressing.) It’s noted for “page 3”, an ongoing feature wherein a photo of a topless young female is positioned on the right-hand page of the paper as you open it, which as we all know is the hallmark of a quality newspaper.
The Sun covers a mixture of celebrity gossip and “real” news, though any political material is presented with an overt conservative slant (think Fox News tempered slightly by a fascination with naked ladies). Extremely popular among the working class, The Sun positions its opinions as being in vogue with, and support of, the common-or-garden hard-working family, which partially explains their kneejerk, right-wing reactionary opinions on everything from immigrants to prison sentences. Then-editor of the paper and all-around scumbag, Kelvin MacKenzie, summed up The Sun’s readership thusly:
[quote]”..the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about [real news]..”[/quote]
The Sun has used its position as the most popular paper in Britain to its advantage; in order to gain the Sun’s support in the 1997 election, Tony Blair had to agree not to join the ERM. And so it was done. At the previous general election in 1992, The Sun had even taken credit for the Conservatives’ win, with their iconic “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” headline. An exaggeration, probably, but few other media outlets could claim to have had anywhere close to a comparable impact to The Sun (the relatively objective BBC, maybe, and that’s about it). They’re also on the socially conservative campaign bandwagon, too, pushing readers to take up slipshod, hysterical causes like reporting suspected social welfare cheaters.
Amidst the soft porn and bogus campaigns, The Sun has been stricken by a number of scandals, most notably “poorly-researched” (read: lies) printed in the immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough soccer tragedy have ensured nobody in the city of Liverpool has purchased the paper in over twenty years (its circulation there is around 12,000, down 70% since ’92, vs a 30% decrease nationally).
You can’t even give the thing away there (skip to 5:50):
Its sister paper, the News of the World (published Sundays), was closed in 2011, following one of the biggest scandals in British journalism history: “Hackgate“, wherein the world discovered that employees of the paper had been engaging in phone and voicemail hacking (including, most appallingly, the families of high-profile murdered children) and police bribery. The Sun on Sunday has recently taken its place, though, so any long-term hopes for a Murdoch tabloid-free Sunday have been dashed.
Not sorry enough to go without a Sunday presence though, eh News Corp?
I was all primed to tell you all how the Daily Mirror (and sister paper Sunday Mirror; website) were the least-worst of the British tabloids; how their liberal slant made them a rare voice of reason in certain mainstream political debates. But every so often they like to remind the world that, at heart, they’re as scaremongering as the rest of them:
The Mirror are the only mainstream newspaper to consistently support the Labour Party (though The Guardian, below, toy with it), which is notable in and of itself. Most other British newspapers are conservative, either big-C or small-c, so its presence remains a welcoming balance. Their unwavering support for the centre-left has done their circulation no favours, though: it’s down to around a million, which still rates them the third most-popular paper in the UK, but is 50% lower than just ten years ago. On certain populist issues they still skew right-wing, but they were notably the only major UK paper to oppose the Iraq war:
The most notable episode in their recent history would be the prisoner-of-war photo hoax. In May 2004, they published a front-page story about British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. It wasn’t true, and the photo evidence had been faked. Once again, a tabloid editor (in this case, the somehow-now-a-TV-star Piers Morgan) didn’t let research of the facts get in the way of a good story.
Settling for third-place in the all-out tabloid stakes, I’m not entirely sure how the Daily Star (website) gets away with calling itself a newspaper; it’s a soft porn rag, with sub-National Enquirer level gossip, speculation and bullshit. On the bright side, it doesn’t tend to worry itself with politics too much, in turn avoiding the hysteria The Sun loves to generate; on the downside, it’s misogynistic and lazy. It sells 750k copies a day, somehow, and is owned by the somewhat sleazy Richard Desmond. Still better than the now-defunct Daily Sport, though, which was effectively a daily porn magazine (NSFW image).
In other Star-themed papers, even British people think the Morning Star (actually unrelated to the Daily Star; website) is socialist/communist; the closest American equivalent would probably be People’s World, although unlike that online-only publication, the Morning Star soldiers on in daily printed form. I mention it as it is officially nationally distributed, although in practice it’s difficult to find at smaller locations. It prints around 20,000 copies per day, which appears to be proportionately more than any Communist paper in the States. Us leftie Brits, eh?
The bashful tabloids
Oh sure, they like to call themselves “mid-market” newspapers, but make no mistake: the papers below are tabloid in all but name, more upmarket in name but not nature. They take plenty of liberties with their coverage; I’m sure they won’t mind me going out on a limb and grouping them in with their red-top brethren.
The second most-popular newspaper in Britain, after The Sun, The Daily Mail sells two million print copies a day, and is home to the most popular newspaper website in the world, ahead of The Huffington Post. It’s basically a middle-class variant of The Sun, home to similar amounts of froth-inducing moral panic and shoddy half-reporting, but printed in serif fonts and with 50% less topless women. They supported the fascists in the 1930s, but now they’ll settle for backing the Conservatives and whining about gay marriage.
Call a Mail reader a tabloid-reader and they’ll have none of it, but the Mail trades on the same mass hysteria as the red-tops do, whipping up panic as and when necessary. Cancer scares, falling house prices and paedophiles are but three of the Daily Mail’s favourite bugbears. They are that “they took our job” scene from South Park in print form. Below is a typical Daily Mail frontpage: Human rights? “Insanity”. (Also of note on that particular day: getting the whinging paupers off of benefits, delivering readers a few pounds off at Britain’s most middle-class supermarket, and Beyonce’s hair colour.)
Its website is so popular because it has honed the art of the linkbait finely; some of their stories are more reminiscent of Buzzfeed than the copy of an actual newspaper website, and everyone loves to share news of another cancer scare:
And there’s plenty more where those came from:
Nevertheless, its success must be applauded in some sense, as its target audience are the middle-class middle-aged, traditionally not among the more technologically experienced. (Perhaps they all find the Daily Mail site a safe haven in a scary world wide web.) Its columnists have also garnered significant attention for the site, recently and notably Jan Moir’s comments boyband star Stephen Gately’s untimely death was “not natural” spread around the Internet like wildfire, promting numerous complaints to Britain’s press commission.
Battling with the Daily Mail for the hysterical chattering classes, we have the Daily Express (website). Notable for its obsession with Princess Diana and all-and-sundry white woman hysteria, it comes close to being a Mail clone on many days, with perhaps a little more stern right-wing paranoia and a little less hypocritical gossip. This one’s also owned by porn baron Richard Desmond.
The oldest source I could find for this spot-on parody is Anorak. The politician in the bottom right is Conservative Party then-leader Michael Howard; the caption reads “Howard is ‘sensitive lover’ and loves stroking kittens”
They’re noted, once again, for their populist right-wing stance, fusing elements of traditional conservatism with modern social conservatism. They also really, really hate the European Union. I hesitate to use the Fox News comparison again, but no major US print titles come close to the kind of insanity these ramble on about.
The tabloids’ penchant for panic has proven ripe for satirists; Russell Howard, British stand-up comedian, has a mixed reputation here, but to those unfamiliar with the Mail and Express, it’s hard to offer a better introduction than his brilliant, brief (one-minute) stand-up piece on the subject:
The relatively restrained USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times, America’s closest demographic equivalents, would be a welcome respite from this shower.
The broadsheets
Read by the few, the proud, the geeky, the broadsheets are the “real” newspapers, even though few of them are printed in (admittedly inconvenient) traditional broadsheet format anymore.
Rather like The Washington Post in the USA, The Times (website) doesn’t come close to being the best-selling newspaper in Britain, but it is the official Newspaper of Record and of government, and it’s probably the most authoritative print source of journalism. (It even invented the Times New Roman font, don’tchaknow?) It’s owned by that lovely newsman who you may recognise from The Sun, Rupert Murdoch, though given its lofty status it attempts to remain a tad more objective than that rag (it’s basically editorially independent). Its audience is primarily upmarket; six-sevenths of its readers are in the ABC1 group, and it’s the most popular newspaper among British businesspeople.
It’s not as formal as it once was, and it’s not uncommon to see advertisements or promotions adorning its front page, but it’s still an altogether respectable paper, formal in principle and in execution. It covers a vast swathe of newsworthy sectors, and its Sunday Times sister paper is laden with dozens of supplements in a manner similar to the New York Times. The online version is behind a paywall nowadays; it was the first British paper to make the leap. It has 120,000 subscribers, which is far from a roaring success (compare that to the 50 million visitors a month the Daily Mail gets) but is at the very least not an outright failure, and in the first month of the paywall, visitors only decreased 27% (the home page and certain other sections remain open to all). On newsstands, it looks like a fairly typical newspaper, appropriate for the newspaper of record:
The Financial Times (website) is probably the most formal newspaper in Britain. It prints around 300,000 copies in the UK, though it has several international editions, which combined sell another 400k+. It’s the British paper with the most directly comparable US equivalent, the Wall Street Journal; both focus on business and financial news, and both have tapped into a niche still willing to part with cash in exchange for news, though the Wall Street Journal is proportinately rather more popular, presumably due to a comparative lack of national broadsheet competition. It’s printed on pink paper, because why not. (Or maybe to distinguish it from a competitor 120 years ago, or something.)
The Telegraph (website), commonly known as The Torygraph due to its undying love for the British Conservative party, is probably the country’s least exciting newspaper. It enjoys cricket, the occasional scoop, and looking presentable on the shelf. It’s retaining its broadsheet print format, and is consequently one of the only British papers to retain the six-to-eight column format of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, though increases in images and adverts make that somewhat difficult to discern nowadays.
At best one percent more independent than most other newspapers, The Independent (website) stops short of outright endorsing any particular political party but remains basically as open to journalistic expediency as the next paper, typically hinting at support for third party also-rans the Liberal Democrats, and the Green party. For a number of years, their tagline was “free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence”, largely interpretable as a jibe at Murdoch’s News Corp. Its website has proven a success, with around 20m visitors per month; indeed, the newspaper as a whole performs strongly, given its relatively short lifespan (the first issue was published in 1986). Its editorial team have a penchant for eyecatching, infographic-driven front pages like the below, which help drive casual sales; it’s still the lowest-selling national paper, though, and lacks prestige outside of liberal circles.
It has a compact offshoot, i, (lowercase, naturally; website), which filters the complicated bits of The Independent out and leaves general audiences with the simplified remnants. It’s primarily aimed at commuters and others with limited time on their hands, for whom a broadsheet is too exhaustive and a tabloid not dense enough in content. It’s notable for being the only newspaper to have consistently gained in circulation, presumably largely due to its low price (20p), and the relative novelty (the first issue only came out in 2010). It sells around 300,000 copies per issue, having overtaken its progenitor in late 2011.
Finally, we come to The Guardian (sometimes known as the Grauniad due to their penchant for typographical errors; website), my newspaper of choice on those occasions I find hard-copy journalism useful. Its focus is in-depth articles and thoughtful commentary, and I tend to find it delivers; it’s left-wing even by British standards, though, so America, watch out. It’s far from unanimously well-regarded, though, with many right-wingers decrying its columnists and readers as “Guardianistas” or champagne liberals (think “latte liberal“); it’s traditionally assciated with “media types”, teachers, and the comfortable middle classes, which are perhaps reasonable assumptions given its vanishingly low circulation.
The Guardian is perhaps the paper that has best embraced the Internet, in any country: it has a number of contributors employed to work solely on the digital edition, it has harvested a fantastic “comment is free” open journalism section, and garners a strong 72 million visits per month. Both the print and digital editions are also home to a number of authoritative industry supplements; MediaGuardian, for example, is regarded as the best source for British media news and analysis.
Unfortunately, its to-date insistence of remaining free online, and focus on quality over headline-grabbing, has turned it into something of a cash drain; selling only 200,000 copies a day and making little cash on its website (certain industry sections offer paid subscriptions but the vast majority of material is free), it’s losing £1.5 million a week. Given its considerable and formidable online presence, it seems plausible that it would become the first major national British paper to go digital-only in the near future.
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“The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country, the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, the Times is read by people who actually do run the country, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country, the Financial Times is read by people who own the country, the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.” – Prime Minister Jim Hacker
“Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?” – Sir Humphrey
“Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.” – Bernard Wooley
— Yes, Prime Minister, “A Conflict of Interest”
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Next week, I’ll be back to a more manageable length of post, as we go back to the land of pop culture and I discuss American adult animation in the UK, and Britain’s attempts to replicate its success.
More from the week that was:
- At the box office, The Hobbit and Life of Pi continue apace. Pi is having brilliant legs here; its word-of-mouth appears to be stronger than the already-stellar US, and it’s on course for £25m+, plausibly ranking it in the top 10 UK box office performers of 2012. The only wide Hollywood release of the week, Playing for Keeps, got lost in the shuffle. Underperforming much like it did domestically, it took £500k through six days, and missed the top ten. European titles Quartet and The Impossible handily outshone it.
- The Oscar nominations were announced today, and British papers of all colours had their patriotism on full blast, placing overt focus on Brits nominated and otherwise..
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- The season 2 premiere of Revenge scored 471,000 viewers, down from 750k for the pilot but still a good number for the channel in a competitive timeslot (immediate +1 timeshifting added over 150k more)
- The latest Taylor Swift single, I Knew You Were Trouble., has hit the UK top 5. Wikipedia says it’s “popstep“. That can’t be good..
