British newspapers

Newspapers play a significant role in British social life. They are, generally, highly regarded by the readers in providing important social, cultural, financial, and political perspectives. As a result, newspapers play a critical role in ensuring the functioning of British democracy. The national, regional, and local newspapers in the United Kingdom continue to be influential in shaping public debate. British newspapers effectively provide a plurality of views on current issues and reporting on matters that are deemed to be in the public interest.

General Characteristics

British newspapers are among the oldest, readily recognized, and highly respected in the world. The Times was established in 1785, The Observer began publishing in 1791, and The Guardian published its first print in 1821. The Daily Telegraph was established in 1855 and Daily Mail was founded in 1896.

The modern newspaper industry in the United Kingdom remains a significant force in the political, social, and economic life of the nation. From the temperate analysis of the Financial Times and The Guardian to the tub-thumping of the tabloid press, the British public has access to a healthy mixture of domestic, foreign, and investigative reporting.

One of most important characteristics of the British newspaper industry is that, in both sales and reputation, the national papers published in London dominate. London’s Fleet Street was once considered the most important location for journalism in the world, with Britain s national newspaper making the street its home for centuries. Although most newspapers have moved away from the location, Fleet Street remains the embodiment of the British newspaper industry. The Fleet Street demise began in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch moved publication of his newspapers The Times, News of the World, and The Sun to new premises in East End of London. However, Fleet Street’s legacy lives on, as a byword for the United Kingdom s national newspapers.

The next prominent characteristics of the British newspapers relate to classification of the papers. British newspapers can generally be split into three distinct categories: the broadsheets, the tabloids, and the free press.

Broadsheets

The first category relates to the more serious and highbrow newspapers; they are usually referred to as the broadsheets. This category of newspapers is also known collectively as the quality press. The titles normally associated with this category are The Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph on Sunday, and The Observer.

The Guardian, for example, is one of Britain’s more trustworthy newspapers and is the newspaper most associated with liberal middle-class and university-educated readers. At the core of the paper’s organizational ethos lies concern over the environment and sustainability as well as trepidations about social, economic, and political inequality. The Guardian’s investigative journalism is some of the best in the industry, and the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public-service reporting in 2014. Winning a Pulitzer Prize is the highest accolade in U.S. journalism and is recognized globally.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

While The Guardian represents the social democratic elements of British politics, The Daily Telegraph is more aligned with Conservative politics. Through the 1970s and 1980s, The Daily Telegraph remained relatively free of labor disputes and maintained financial stability under its group ownership headed by Lord Hartwell. In 1985, Canadian financier Conrad Black bought a majority interest in The Telegraph. Questions about Black’s management of the newspaper, combined with financial scandals, forced change of ownership. In July 2004, the paper was acquired by twin brothers Sir David and Sir Fredrick Barclay who also owned The Scotsman.

Unlike The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times have changed in recent years to a compact format, the same size as the tabloids. The Guardian moved in September 2005 to what is described as a Berliner format, slightly larger than a compact. Its Sunday stablemate The Observer followed suit. Both The Guardian and The Observer now use the tabloid format, having done so since January 2018. Despite these format changes, these newspapers are all still considered broadsheets.

Other Sunday broadsheets, including The Sunday Times, which tend to have a large amount of supplementary sections, have kept their larger sized format. The national Sunday titles usually have a different layout and style from their weekly sister papers and are produced by separate journalistic and editorial staff.

News of the World: A Special Case in the History of the British Newspaper Industry

The News of the World is a particularly interesting case in the long history of the British newspaper industry. The paper was a weekly national newspaper published every Sunday from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world’s highest selling English-language newspaper, and at the time of closure still had one of the highest circulations in the country. The paper was originally established as a quality broadsheet by John Browne Bell in 1843 and was generally regarded as a respected Sunday paper. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited acquired the paper in 1969 and initially retained its broadsheet format until 1984 when it was launched as a red-top tabloid for the first time. News of the World later became the Sunday sister publication of The Sun.

In many ways, News of the World had all the traits of a paper passionately committed to issues related to public interest. It cleverly addressed the readers directly by giving space to their opinions. This was a hugely successful commercial, enabling News of the World to claim 2.6 million regular sales every Sunday.

From 2006, however, the paper was increasingly entangled in allegations of phone hacking. The allegations were initially related to the revelation that the paper had hired a private investigator to intercept the voicemails of a missing teenager, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. In 2011, it eventually became clear that the paper had hacked into the phones of many people who were deemed as subjects of interest or seen as news worthy. They included the families of British military personnel killed in action, celebrities, and high-profile politicians. As further allegations against the paper were made public, a number of senior editors of News of the World were arrested, convicted, and jailed for phone hacking.

News International announced on July 7, 2011, that, after 168 years in print, News of the World would print its final edition on July 10, 2011, with the loss of 200 jobs. In the paper’s final editorial, the paper admitted that “phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry…there is no justification for this appalling wrongdoing.” The final edition of News of the World sold 3.8 million copies, about 1 million more than usual.

The News of the World’s absence from the Sunday market represents an unprecedented episode in the history of the British newspaper industry. The phone hacking by the paper’s journalists led to the closure of a historically significant media establishment and had formed the basis of a parliamentary inquiry and the launch of three police investigations. Furthermore, the phone hacking episode led the Conservative government to instruct Lord Justice Leveson to conduct a two-part inquiry to assess the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press and its relationships with the police, the public, and the politicians. The Leveson report concluded that there was recklessness in the way News of the World had prioritized sensational stories irrespective of the harm the stories could cause the rights of those who would be affected. The Leveson report has since become synonymous with the way regulatory bodies failed to prevent the journalists working for News of the World to act unlawfully, and unethically, by using their profession to intrude into private citizens’ lives.

Recent Structural Transformations in the National Newspaper Industry

The News of the World s demise and Metro s recent success underline a much deeper institutional and structural transformation in the British newspaper industry. During the first two decades of the 21st century, British newspapers, and the provision of news as a whole, has gone through considerable changes. Fueled by shifts in reader behavior and preferences, and by technological innovation, particularly among younger age groups, readers are now able to access news via multiple means from a wide variety of sources and often at no cost. Increasingly, news is also mediated by social and search platforms, which, despite the availability of tools and practices to help publisher s monetize their content on their platforms, do not necessarily compensate the original producers of much of the news journalism surfaced online.

Overall, national newspaper readership has dropped by one fifth since the 1990s, according to the National Readership Survey. The most significant implication of this trend has been in the way advertisers have shifted to other media to get their messages across. According to Press Gazette, the national newspapers share of advertising spending has decreased from 21 percent in 1985 to 10 percent in 2018.

Another major impact of the falling readership trend is related to young people’s consumption of news brands. The young are just not buying newspapers the way their parents did. When young Britons do read newspapers, they tend to like the ones without much news. Richard Desmond, the former owner of Express Newspapers and publisher of titles ranging from Women on Top to the Daily Star, managed to reinvent this end of the market by relying heavily on celebrity news, often jointly with OK!, a specialist weekly magazine published by the same group.

All the major British newspapers currently have websites, some of which provide free access. The Times and The Sunday Times have a paywall requiring payment on a per-day or per-month basis by nonsubscribers. The Financial Times business daily also has limited access for nonsubscribers. The Independent became available online only upon its last printed edition on March 26, 2016. However, unlike the previously mentioned newspapers, it does not require any payment to access its news content. Instead, the newspaper offers extras for those wishing to sign up to a payment subscription, such as crosswords, puzzles, weekend supplements, and the ability to automatically download each daily edition to read offline.

Regional Newspapers

Most towns and cities in the United Kingdom have at least one local newspaper, such as the Evening Post in Bristol and The Echo in Cardiff. They are not known nationally for their journalism in the way that some city-based newspapers in the United States are (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe). An exception to this was The Manchester Guardian, which dropped the Manchester from its name in 1959 and relocated its main operations to London in 1964. The Guardian Media Group produced a Mancunian paper, The Manchester Evening News, until 2010 when along with its other local newspapers in the Greater Manchester area it was sold to Trinity Mirror.

In addition to publishing printed material, most local and regional publishers in the United Kingdom have dedicated websites. However, in recent years, many publishers have launched local digital-only news brands. The regional newspapers have benefited from digitization of their products, but new opportunities arising from digital technologies have not compensated for the losses suffered in print revenues. Circulation declines have had two impacts a drop in unit sales that cover price increases have not fully offset and a decline in advertising revenues reflecting lower readership.

Partisan Press

The British newspaper market dynamics are increasingly pushing paid-for papers in a more partisan direction. While circulation of newspapers has declined considerably, this has not diminished national newspapers influence on British politics.

Generally, national newspapers are not formally tied to specific political parties. However, most papers display clear political alignments that are usually determined by their owners. The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph have consistently supported the Conservative Party, whereas The Daily Mirror and The Guardian have normally supported the Labour Party. The Sun, one of the most popular newspapers in the United Kingdom, supported Labour in the early 1970s, switched to the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and switched back again to Labour in the late 1990s, only to return to the Conservatives by the early 21st century.

These political alignments by the national newspapers are particularly evident during, and after, the referendum on Britain’s European Union (EU) membership in 2016. The referendum on Britain’s EU membership (Brexit) highlighted two very important issues: It had become the biggest political event in Britain in recent memory and that news media, particularly newspapers, responded proactively with their extensive coverage, editorials, and in-depth discussion of various issues related to benefits or disadvantages of Britain’s membership. National newspapers’ involvement was hugely influential in providing the people with relevant information; however, various studies have shown that the newspaper coverage of the campaign was biased toward Leave. Moreover, it was found that those who voted for Remain were more likely than before to expect their favorite newspaper to reflect their political views.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, for example, showed that newspaper coverage of the referendum campaign was biased toward Brexit. After analyzing 2,378 articles, the Reuters Institute report reveals that of media pieces focused on the referendum, 41 percent were pro-Leave while 27 percent had a pro-Remain frame. This trend is further exacerbated when factoring in the reach of different outlets, with 48 percent of all articles showing a pro-Leave leaning and 22 percent pro-Remain line.

The British newspapers have long been seen as experts in setting the agenda for all other forms of media to follow. Media researchers at Loughborough University examined the extent to which different newspapers ran positive or negative reports about different political parties in the first week of the 2019 general election campaign. They found that the Labour Party was overwhelmingly targeted with negative coverage by the national newspapers, while in certain papers, positive stories were almost exclusively reserved for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. The study also showed that the most positive coverage of the Conservative Party came from the highest circulation newspapers, with journalists at The Sun and the Daily Mail relied upon to publish deferential and pro-government reports. There is debate as to what extent newspaper coverage influences public opinion. One study carried out at the London School of Economics found that a boycott of The Sun on Merseyside (Liverpool, England) in the wake of a local incident appears to have led to lower levels of Euroskepticism in the region.

Migration to Online Platforms

The British newspapers industry remains highly influential in the social, political, and economic life of the nation. The national newspapers remain rather effective at two levels. In the tabloid sector, Daily Mail and The Sun are vital forces in British social and political life. The popular tabloid newspapers have a reputation for exposing corruption and wrongdoings at all levels of society. This point was discussed in relation to The News of the World.

The British national newspapers can also compete at a global level. According to Omniture (an online marketing and web analytics firm based in Utah in the United States) MailOnline is one of the world’s largest English-language newspaper websites with more than 24.9 million monthly unique visitors, each spending an average of 49 minutes on the site per month. Furthermore, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport survey, MailOnline has retained its position as one of the most visited newspaper websites in the United Kingdom.

In the broadsheet category, Britain is home to a cluster of globally reputable newspapers such as the Financial Times and The Economist. According to the Financial Times website, digital subscriptions now account for more than three quarters of the newspaper-s circulation and 70 percent of its readers are outside the United Kingdom, illustrating the publication’s global reach. Similarly, The Economist claims on its website that its current circulation is over 1.4 million, more than four fifths of it outside Britain. The American circulation accounts for over half of the total.

However, the national newspaper industry in Britain has been under sustained pressure for more than 20 years. The constant shift in readers preferences and a greater migration to online platforms has had a detrimental impact on advertising revenue. Recent developments have transformed the traditional consumption of content via print products, forcing the industry to increasingly prepare for further migration of readers to online formats. Fundamentally, these changes have severely impaired news brands traditional revenue streams which include circulation, print display advertising, and classifieds.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.