The British press is national. Where America has great city papers — the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times — Britain has around a dozen titles sold everywhere, from Penzance to Aberdeen, competing for the same readers.
That structure is the key to everything else about it: a national market makes newspapers unusually powerful, unusually competitive, and unusually political.
The tiers
Broadsheets
- The Times — centre-right, establishment, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK.
- The Daily Telegraph — Conservative, nicknamed the Torygraph.
- The Guardian — left-liberal, owned by a trust rather than a proprietor, free online and funded largely by reader contributions.
- The Financial Times — printed on pink paper, read internationally, and the closest thing Britain has to a paper without a political line.
- The Independent — online only since 2016.
Mid-market
The Daily Mail and Daily Express. The Mail is the more significant: strongly right-wing, extremely well produced, and with an online operation that is among the most-read English-language news sites in the world.
Tabloids
The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star — mass-market, celebrity and sport-heavy, and famous for headlines. The Sun’s “GOTCHA” on the sinking of the Belgrano and “FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER” are part of the national furniture. The Mirror is the main left-leaning tabloid.
Openly partisan
British papers do not pretend to neutrality. They endorse parties explicitly at elections, and the endorsement is treated as news in itself.
The Sun’s switch from Conservative to Labour in 1997 was a significant political moment, and its 1992 front page after John Major’s unexpected win — “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT” — is the most-quoted headline in British political history, though psephologists doubt the claim.
Broadcasters are regulated for impartiality; newspapers are not, and the contrast is deliberate.
Phone hacking
The defining scandal of the modern British press. It emerged that journalists at the News of the World, then Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday paper, had hacked the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, crime victims and the families of dead soldiers.
The revelation in 2011 that the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been hacked caused such revulsion that Murdoch closed the 168-year-old paper within days. The Leveson Inquiry followed, recommending a new system of press regulation that was never fully implemented — the industry set up its own regulator instead, and the second part of the inquiry was abandoned.
The decline
Print circulation has collapsed. The Sun sold over four million copies a day in the 1990s and a fraction of that now, and most titles no longer publish figures. Revenue has shifted online, where the Mail and Guardian have been most successful, and local newspapers — always separate from the national market — have been devastated, with hundreds closed since 2005.