Why is the British newspaper scene so lively and crowded?
Posted by RepresentativeGlad17@reddit | AskABrit | View on Reddit | 52 comments
The British newspaper world seems much more lively and varied than that of the US. Can someone give a thumbnail taxonomy of British papers? And why is it so thriving, when US newspapers seem to be on life support?
amusingjapester23@reddit
One reason might be, more commuters use public transport in the UK.
Antique_Historian_74@reddit
The British print media exists to propagandise views billionaires want the British public to hold, sometimes successfully.
crucible@reddit
The political satire Yes, Prime Minister is still surprisingly relevant:
Alexander-Wright@reddit
https://youtu.be/DGscoaUWW2M?si=qAV54nvATV-NsLnq
Kinitawowi64@reddit
I'd also like to offer Russell Howard on Mock The Week.
JCDU@reddit
I'll throw this one in:
The Daily Mail leads with the headline “Everything Is Fine: Fear It, Fear It.” from That Mitchell And Webb Look
Big-Parking9805@reddit
I like the Danny Baker line on the media
"If you're not scared, we're not doing our job correctly"
WodehouseWeatherwax@reddit
Came here to post this. You did it much better.
KonkeyDongPrime@reddit
They’ve mainly been bought out by shady AF overseas billionaires, who really don’t like paying tax. A common theme in many papers funnily enough, is to publish hatchet jobs and OpEds that paint paying tax as a bad thing.
If you’re really interested about lifting the lid, you should subscribe to Private Eye magazine. They also break stories years before the regular press does. They were out ahead on the Horizon scandal. They have also been reporting on the Welby/Smyth relationship for years, which only this week resulted in Welby resigning.
Big-Parking9805@reddit
Lisa Letby is the latest one which I think they're ahead of the curve with. I don't subscribe to Private Eye, but I do listen to their podcast and have a lot of respect for the work they do. Ian Hislop is a bit of a national treasure I would argue.
DaveBeBad@reddit
Some of them are owned by shady British billionaires. Like the daily mail…
KonkeyDongPrime@reddit
“Overseas” Rothermere is NonDom residing in France
DaveBeBad@reddit
He was born and schooled here. But at least he is no longer in the House of Lords.
Affectionate_Name522@reddit
The Daily Twaddlegraph allows readers to comment on articles online and spew their racist and phobic guts. There is little sign of any moderation of such bile. Commenting folk seem to be able love to put the boot in. And the organ boasts large readership. But it comes about by encouraging hate and outrage. The same model as Fox News?
Realistic-River-1941@reddit
British newspapers focus on their audience. American newspapers focus on some abstract notion of what old men think journalism ought to be.
If you get a room full of British journalists, they talk about the audience. American journalists talk about gatekeeping journalism.
Makemeup-beforeUgogo@reddit
I think the newspapers appeal to a mix of classes and minds. Guardian and Independent comes across at the most neutral when it comes to reporting the news. Maybe the Times isn’t much after Then you have the Sun and the Mirror that are going into Tabloid territory. Daily Mail’s the most notorious tabloid to spin the headlines. There’s probably more but I come across these most often.
Realistic-River-1941@reddit
This is all you need to know to understand the British newspapers https://youtu.be/DGscoaUWW2M?si=R-SX4YEMb1ZZQzbr
Rocky-bar@reddit
If you think the UK newspaper world is lively and crowded, God only knows what US papers must be like, I thought ours were as bad as it's possible to be.
AnotherPint@reddit
The small, exclusive top tier of national American newspapers are stable and healthy. The New York Times has 11 million paying subscribers. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc. are profitable too.
Below that tier, at the regional and local level, journalism is being absolutely gutted. Something like one-third of the country’s papers have closed in the past 20 years. They don’t even have a chance to go downmarket or try Page 3 girls to stem the decline (and we have never had a real lurid tabloid Sun / Mirror-type newspaper culture anyway). They just collapse.
Ironically they are dying because people now get their news online instead, but the online sources depend for content on the old-school news outlets which are collapsing.
ChicagoJohn123@reddit
I wonder how much of this is that as Americans we see London as the UK. There is still decent news coverage of Manhattan. That doesn’t there’s good coverage of Duluth.
JimmySquarefoot@reddit
You might be onto something there!
Same as how (some) Americans think everyone is getting stabbed left right and centre here
PodcastPlusOne_James@reddit
Which is interesting given that a quick Google search would let them know that the knife homicide rate in the US is almost twice that of the UK
chroniccomplexcase@reddit
I’ve said this to Americans who ask if I’m scared about going to london (especially when they know I’m a deaf female who is a full time wheelchair user), especially on my own and I reply that I’m really not and give this statistic and they either don’t believe me or don’t understand the maths and reply “but the UK is much smaller than the USA”
PodcastPlusOne_James@reddit
Exhibit #57,674 of Americans not understanding how per capita works
I’m sure they went on to tell you how much bigger America is and how their states are “basically like European countries”
chroniccomplexcase@reddit
Oh 100% and how if I drove for 2 hours I’d be in France (I wouldn’t, though I could be over a border into wales if I went in one direction, which I guess is technically another country) but if they did it they’d still be in their state. I just replied “nice to see your education system is clearly topping the international league tables for maths” and they thought it was a compliment.
Judge_Dreddful@reddit
It is anything but thriving! It is haemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate but is being supported by right wing non-dom billionaires who realise that their easily led gammony fanbase are the only ones that still read newspapers. Once that generation dies, they'll throw their money at online dissemination and hate.
ninjomat@reddit
It depends what you mean by lively.
In terms of sales/profitability I think uk print media is just as dead as it is the US. Big newspapers are surviving off people visiting their websites. Nobody is buying physical papers here anymore.
If you mean lively in terms of feistiness. How aggressive and partisan the reporting is then I’d say it’s simply an interesting case of uk news being the inverse of the US. As I understand it - in the US television news is very partisan affiliated - Fox News is hyper right wing and constantly demonising liberals while msnbc is the opposite and always attacking conservatives, by contrast in the uk our news channels really don’t vary much in terms of taking a particularly strong line. BBC and ITV both take a fairly neutral “centrist” approach to reporting which usually desensationalises stories - channel 4 veers slightly to the left of those two while Sky news is more right leaning but tv news is pretty drab generally. By contrast our newspapers are heavily partisan - what you think about Brexit, immigrants, culture wars, wealth distribution etc will vary a lot if you’re a guardian or a daily mail reader, these are more akin to the hyper partisan American tv news and similarly dramatic - in the US it is the papers which take a more neutral serious tone with the big national papers NY times, Washington post La times fairly moderate liberal and the Wall Street journal moderate conservative. So basically newspapers are to the uk news media what cable news is to American news.
Why this is I don’t really know. My best guess would be given the size of the US that in order to get wide enough readership to make circulation economically viable any newspaper that wanted to be printed nationally had to hew towards the middle ground to keep enough readers- which wasn’t a problem in the uk
chris5156@reddit
Worth mentioning that the reason TV (and radio) news in the UK is nonpartisan is that it has to be by law. All broadcast news must be unbiased and reflect all sides of an issue; the public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV and C4) are held to even higher standards. The press is not subject to those rules and can do what it likes.
Opening_Succotash_95@reddit
There is one exception which is GB News, which wants to be the UK version of Fox News and is allowed to get away with much more op-ed stuff for no good reason.
chris5156@reddit
Yes, I’m not sure what’s going on there, they’re bound by the same rules but for some reason Ofcom aren’t doing much. I wondered if the change of government might mean they were pushed to take a harder line but nothing so far.
DaveBeBad@reddit
GB News (like Fox) claim they are entertainment rather than news. So they get away with it - although they were recently in trouble for Sunak doing a program on there.
Sufficient_Mirror_12@reddit
The BBC was pretty Tory friendly when they were in power.
FuzzyDunlop1982@reddit
As above, Private Eye is the only news print worth buying. Local newspapers, local news radio, all dead or dying out. Industry has taken quite the hit.
JasterBobaMereel@reddit
There are technically quite a few daily national newspapers in the UK ...
But there are only 6 publishing companies
Only the free newspaper gets a circulation anywhere near 900,000 a day, most simply stopped telling people as it is too embarrassingly low, they are all going downwards, and most are around 200,000 or lower
ElectroTaxonomist@reddit
A Taxonomy of newspapers you say
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
JCDU@reddit
If a sewer was overflowing you wouldn't call it lively and crowded.
imminentmailing463@reddit
The UK newspaper market isn't thriving. The print media industry is in bad shape in the UK just like the US. Circulation is going down and down and online revenues haven't made up for the lost print revenues.
overcoil@reddit
^^ This.
Mammoth_Park7184@reddit
That's what the upvote button is for.
overcoil@reddit
Already upvoted. Wanted to award but am too tight fisted. Might edit to a "Hear Hear! (mumble)"
virgin_goat@reddit
This this
Obvious_Arm8802@reddit
Have you ever lived in another country?
I live in Australia and we have the choice of two newspapers, one national and one state. Both of them made by the same company.
This isn’t a new thing either - it’s been the same since I moved here 20 years ago.
And in that whole time there’s only been the choice of one national newspaper.
imminentmailing463@reddit
Lots of European countries have lots of newspapers like we do. We aren't particularly an outlet in that regard. For example, France has 11 national daily papers, Germany has 9. Denmark has 10. The Netherlands has 8. Ireland has 8. Spain has lots. Italy has loads.
We have 11. So we aren't a particular outlier here.
And I think we shouldn't go overboard on the variety of newspapers here. We have lots of titles, but the actual diversity isn't that great. Largely because they're all owned by just a handful of organisations.
But all of that aside, the industry certainly can't be described as currently thriving here. It's well noted to be an industry that is really struggling.
BaggyBloke@reddit
British newspapers would have died out due to falling sales, riding costs of journalism but for one thing: they are a very powerful way to control the political agenda.
Splashing provocative, hyperbolic headlines across the front page day after day set the agenda for other news services. E.g. if the daily mail accuses a politician of wrong doing for long enough and loud enough, however flimsy the evidence, other outlets like the BBC feel obliged to report on it, headlines are copied into social media and the whole thing blows up either damaging the politician or driving other stories into the background.
The result is politicians need the press onside to survive, which means there is no desire to take them in hold the press to any professional standards (see leveson 2) allowing the cycle to continue.
The result of all this is that 80% of our press is owned by 5 billionaires (I think all but one don't even live in the UK) pushing for a low regulatory, low tax agenda with a liberal sprinkling of anti EU sentiment (a block with strong regulation and high taxes). They are very successful at persuading people who aren't very engaged and take what they read in their trusted paper on faith. This is enough to swing votes.
This is good for big business, bad for the average working citizen. It's no coincidence that over the last decade, life has got worse for most of us in many ways, but the wealthiest have gotten a lot richer. The newspapers are a key tool for achieving this.
chris5156@reddit
This is a good analysis.
ConfectionCommon3518@reddit
Most buyers of physical print are generally in their 50s or above and are literally a dying breed.
It seems like a lot of papers but I think these days is mainly the same content other than a bit of local news on who has died or hot locked up just published everywhere.
Forever_Chill_86@reddit
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Print media is in decline and has been for years. Tabloids are still sold in shops and people do buy them, but I'd say the audience is mostly older people and sales figures are down year after year. There is still a reasonable selection, though, but this is mainly because the tabloids have been around for decades and prior to the Internet, they held a huge amount of political and 'soft power'. Each of the big tabloids serves a specific demographic of the population, see the famous newspaper scene from the TV show 'Yes, Prime Minister', and most of them have managed to pivot online to keep them in business.
Vectis01983@reddit
Printed newspapers aren't thriving, but some online 'newspapers' are. For instance, like it or not, the Daily Mail, or Mailonline as I think it's called, is thriving and has one of the biggest readerships worldwide, never mind just the UK.
Free newspapers, given away at rail stations etc especially in London, do seem popular still, but how profitable they are I have no idea.
NortonBurns@reddit
They're so profitable, the Standard finally gave up last month & went online only. The Metro survives… so far.
Whulad@reddit
It isn’t thriving.
Disastrous-Pepper391@reddit
Gutter press 🐖
ErskineLoyal@reddit
I can't imagine anybody praising UK tabloids. My God...😬