Newspapers---give us quick overview
 

While in the UK this fall, we would love to read some of the newspapers--especially over breakfast--our daily habit.
We are confused by which ones to read.
We read our local ones, the Contra Costa Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and also read, online, the NY TImes, and sometimes articles on the Christian Science Monitor (we are not religious, just like the rather non-biased reporting)
We are not liberal or conservative in most political issues,,,just sort of independent.
That all give you a clue as to which papers we would like in London and Edinburgh?
Recommendations, please!!
Thanks.

The Independent then.

The Guardian is the left-wing paper of choice - to wit the recent revelations in it of spying on everyone - The Times is more conservative but still a paper of record like the NYTimes - the Telegraph is conservative and then you have the likes of the notorious tabloids - like the Daily Mail, known for always having a topless bosom young lass just inside the cover.

At the B&B I stay at I had a Guardian paper and the land lady said "ah that's for people who want to think" - she was reading the Daily Mail.

W/ your description I'd read the Independent and the Telegraph (which is 'conservative' but not conservative in US use of the term - quite middle of the road actually)

But really - try lots of them -- the number and breadth of newspapers in the news agents/kiosks is one of the best things about the UK.

OH, PalenQ, My laugh for the day. Thanks.
So, to summarize:
1.)Guardian...like my Chronicle sort of "left-wing", liberal
2.)The Times and Telegraph, perhaps more like our conservative Wall Street Journal (partly a financial paper, but conservative politically, I would say)Not to be compared to your Financial Times, probably? Living in Northern California, we don't have many "conservative" newspapers, to offer in comparison.

Oh, thanks, janisj...Must have been typing while you were.
Thanks for the clarification as to "conservative"
Going to be fun to compare the newspapers...but will skip the big bosom Daily Mail, hopefully.

"like the Daily Mail, known for always having a topless bosom young lass just inside the cover"

This is so incorrect!
The Mail (as the Daily Mail is always called) does NOT have page 3 girls (as they are known).

The Grauniad (Guardian) has always been our paper of choice. You can read it online before hand to get a feel for it, the same with the Torygraph (Telegraph), and the Indy.

The Times, is behind a pay-wall I believe like most of Murdoch's rags.

The redtops - Mail, Sun, Mirror are comics. The Mail doesn't have topless ladies - the Sun does. The Daily Star (not to be confused with the Morning Star)doesn't even merit the term comic.

The Express is fine if you are a Princess Diana fan and believe she was murdered by Prince Philip. Well kind of, that is the impression I always have of it, but I haven't read it in several decades, not since long before she died.

All have Sunday version. The Observer being the Sunday version of the Guardian.

There are also plenty of local papers, some very local, just a town, usually weekly, others covering a county for instance.

If you like lots of reading then the Guardian on Saturday and the Sunday Times will keep you going over a weekend and beyond. Both have good Travel Sections and have lists and analysis of What's On (the Guardian is better on this). The Guardian on Friday have a good section on Film - if that's something you might do over here.

We read the Mail and the Guardian in this household - covers all bases!

The only newspaper worth making even a short trip to buy, IMHO, is <i>The Times</i> or its sister <i>The Sunday Times</i>, which regretfully can't be read online without a subscription these days. Most of the others you can find online with a Google search, so can see what they are like before you get to the UK.

I would include <i>The Guardian</i> in the comic category, myself. That is the newspaper which comically tried to influence Ohio voters in the 2004 US presidential election, and may have swung the vote in the opposite way it intended: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3981823.stm :-))

check them all out online and choose one before you go! I read the Guardian everyday and the daily mail for weird stories not news!They are all availble!

Brighten up your breakfast by reading Private Eye and Viz.

Private Eye for the stories the papers are too afraid to publish and Viz is.. well, you'll just have to buy it and find out.

In Edinburgh you should read the Scotsman the daily paper printed in the city and it's evening local paper Edinburgh Evening News.the main Scottish Tabloid is the Daily Record.

Some of the statemens above are just plain wrong. Whatever you think of the Daily Mail as a source of news, it is certainly not a "red-top" and has never had any "page 3 girls". It's more up-market than the Sun, Star or Mirror and the typical readership traditionally has been middle class housewives and comfortably off retired people.

I read the Telegraph when in the UK--some hotels have reading copies available.

PQ likes folks to think he knows a lot about the UK - knowledge mainly derived from watching Coronation Street- but honestly where did he come up w/ page 3 girls in the Daily Mail???

Geeze

I think you will find most middle class, middle income, intelligentsia read The Guardian on the train.......but have a copy of The Mail hidden inside.

Who gives a damn about the size of the US treasury's quantitative easing when you can find out who Harry Styles is bopping this week.

The Sun is great for wrapping your fish and chips up.

In terms of blatent sexual exploitation The Sunday Times tries to place scantily clad 25 year old female models on every page. I think last Sunday they achieved this on 82% of their pages which is a new record.

As someone posted earlier The Independent.

Failing that save the money and use the BBC website as most of the population is increasingly doing so.

Going off on a slight tangent, one of the ironic things about the Daily Mail (as Private Eye is always keen to point out) is its long-running campaign to ban internet porn sites, yet their own website www.dailymail.co.uk is packed with gratuitous photos of scantily clad women. Mind you, that's not as bad as the Sun who run stories ranting against the menace of paedophiles yet used to run page three photos of girls as young as 16.

Do realize that most responding are telling you what <i>they</I> would read - not what you would read based on your criteria. You may find the guardian is much more left leaning than you are used to. Quite left of the Chron. UK is in general much more liberal (small L) than most of the States.

As always Yes Minister provides

<i>Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: 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 the 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.
Sir Humphrey: Oh and Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.</i>

That is perfect. I had forgot about that Yes Minister bit. Brilliant. . .

PQ likes folks to think he knows a lot about the UK - knowledge mainly derived from watching Coronation Street- but honestly where did he come up w/ page 3 girls in the Daily Mail???>

Well it is one of those ilk - maybe the Sun - one paper I believe and you of course will know for sure as about everything British even though you are a Yank - what paper it is - that there is one I have no doubt - being a newspaper junkie - picking up papers in trains, the Tube - so what paper is it?

http://femusings.org/news-in-briefs/

Yeh it is The Sun - easy to mix up with Dily Mile you know - page 3 topless bimbos - guess it is not a family newspaper.

Scrawled on Fleet Street walls long ago "MURDOCH IS BAD NEWS" - during a strike in protest of Rupert Murdoch's moving his printing operations off Fleet St down river someplace - and that rings true today - Murdoch (owner of the august Times) is bad news - boycott any Murdoch newspaper - even to wrap garbage!

Thanks, unclegus for the Edinburgh information
I will check out, online, the suggestions..Daily Mail, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph
What marvelous information is available on this site.!!
In the US, we are also starting to switch to internet news, Dickie_Gr, but we MUST have paper copy in our hands for breakfast. Hope this trend away from "hard copy" paper editions doesn't lead to their demise.
I agree, janisj, that was brilliant, alanRow. Funny. Classic.

Having now spent a little time online, I think I have settled on the Guardian, the Independent, and the Telegraph. Not necessarily in that order. Didn't like the Daily Mail AT ALL..didn't look to find a Daily Sun online version.
Here are the links I used, let me know if there is a better one for the Guardian. I typed in guardian.co.uk, but came up with these alternatives:
http://www.theguardian.com/world

http://www.theguardian.com/us

http://www.theguardian.com/uk

And this one for the Independent:http://www.independent.co.uk/
For the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
And for the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

The printed Daily Mail is nothing like its rather lurid website.

They have conservative or even Tory papers in Edinburgh? Didn't know they even had Tories in Scotland - except maybe one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mundell).

<i>In terms of blatent sexual exploitation The Sunday Times tries to place scantily clad 25 year old female models on every page. I think last Sunday they achieved this on 82% of their pages which is a new record. </i>

Very funny! You made me dig my copy of Sunday Times out of the dustbin to see what you were on about. :-)) There <i>was</i> a photo of middle-aged women who had undergone double mastectomies posing for a charity calendar, but no "scantily clad 25 year old female models" that i could see.

Gordon_R: That thought did occur to me, also. Wonder why they make the online version so "lurid" ???...to use your term
Since the Daily Mail was described as being for housewives and retirees, I doubted they would read it if it was like this online version!!
Will certainly check out the actual papers, and thanks again, all of you, for this wonderful conversation and information.

The biggest Tory of all must be out in his wellies mucking about keeping the stupid colonists at bay or I am certain he would have responded to this by now.

No the last Tory from Scotland died just the other day - the rest have gone south of the border for safety.

My favorite way to spend a Sunday, a rainy Sunday, while visiting the UK is to walk to the news agent and buy one of everything and a packet of McVities digestive biscuits. Perhaps two. They are delicious with tea in the morning and just as delicious with cheese and whisky late in the afternoon.

We usually stay with friends who have widely differing political opinions, differing from each other as well as from us. Some of them are as horrified to have"that rag" in the house, though what ?"that rg" might be differs from friend to friend. I have been asked to hide papers when I put them out for the dust men.

Here in America, we read he weekend FT with regularity..

>>"like the Daily Mail, known for always having a topless bosom young lass just inside the cover"<<

I believe it has a certain reputation for snidey columns and captions about photos of various female celebrities, not topless (that hardly sits with its censorious, curtain-twitching style), but generally along the lines of "Hasn't she let herself go", or "How can she get rid of her cellulite", and so on.

>>UK is to walk to the news agent and buy one of everything and a packet of McVities digestive biscuits. <<

Must be plain chocolate</u> Digestives for me . . . Fills an entire Sunday.<u>

My personal favourite in the weekday stakes is the Times which I actually think is the most neutral (despite the Independent claiming so to be). The Times officially changed sides at the last election though which gave me serious pause for thought and every now and then I have paroxsysms of guilt at reading it. The Telegraph is very right wing, the Guardian very left. I quite like the Guardian but it has on occasion some quite badly written articles that put me in mind of 1st year media student essays. Also, I thought the Falling Man article a few years back was very nearly unforgiveable.

I used to like the Independant and they used my old employer to write occasional science articles - it impressed me that they would source information from the industry rather than simply go with an editorial. Again, they have gone a bit worthy and lectury in recent years.

On a business and science writing course once I learned that The Sun has the highest clarity index of any paper, and I will admit a grudging admiration for some of their headlines. The Daily Mail, as well as being rabidly afraid of everything and everyone is famous for 'partworks' i.e serialisations of stuff like the Duchess of Windsors knicker collection in nice glossy cut out and keeps.

One other thing - the Sunday papers often have a completely different editorial team and thus a different tone.

I am learning a lot, but have a question I wish you all would talk about: It seems from what has been said that the meanings of LIBERAL and CONSERVATIVE in the UK are different from what we, here in the US, mean. What do each mean to a Btit?

Tories (Conservative) in the UK would be middle or very slightly left in the US. Labour has factions and in US terms would be center-left to very far left. The very far right in the would partly be the UKIP. In general every faction is a little left of the comparable group in the US.

This is pretty general -- and the factions don'r translate directly to comparable groups in the US.

Many Brits will disagree w/ this but that is my observation being a Californian having lived in the UK and visiting often.

Thanks, janisj. VERY CONFUSING. I put UKIP into google, not knowing what that meant and found this:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Politic...United_Kingdom

Had to laugh at the lst part of the description of the labor (labour) party

"Had to laugh at...." Why? Only humor I saw was at the end of the BNP bit.

<i>Only humor I saw was at the end of the BNP bit.</i>

I think describing David Cameron as a "notable figure" is pretty funny.