No doubt about it, the British press has a “style” all of its own and enjoys worldwide notoriety for its scandal-mongering tabloids (format: 597 mm × 375 mm), which can also be classified by the colour of their titles.

In fact, there are red tops like the Daily Mirror, and the more “serious” black tops like the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk ). Circulation is very high. The Daily Mirror (http://www.mirror.co.uk ), for example, founded in 1903 on a clever intuition by Alfred Harmsworth, the famous owner of The Times, can boast a circulation of over 1.7 million copies reaching around 7 million readers.
The tabloid with the most impressive circulation, however, is The Mirror’s rival, The Sun (http://www.thesun.co.uk/), which churns out around 3.2 million copies a day read by 8.5 million readers. A small star in the media constellation of News Group Newspapers, in turn a major galaxy in the media universe of Rupert Murdoch. Just to put things in perspective.

The Sun has twice as many readers as The Times (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/global/), which is still the country’s “conservative” daily. In the quality range, in the traditional format, there is also its centre-left rival The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/) with a circulation (2006) of just over 369,000 against the 901,000 sold by the Daily Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk) and the 212,000 by The Independent (www.independent.co.uk).

In the financial press, lastly, the UK has a real gem, The Financial Times (www.ft.com), one of the few, if not the only, UK paper to sell more abroad than at home. In 2006, its circulation was 400,000, reaching nearly 1.6 million readers worldwide.