When you are in the UK learning English with UIC you are surrounded by all sorts of opportunities to practise your English outside the school. One of the obvious ways you can do this is to read a newspaper – in central London you can get a free newspaper in the morning and in the evening, so even if you don’t have any money you can still do this easily enough. The free newspapers are ‘The Metro’ which you can get at tube stations in the morning and the ‘Evening Standard’ which you can get at tube stations in the evening. Although the Metro has always been free, the Standard wasn’t free until very recently so it does have a tradition of being a normal newspaper at least; the Metro tends to re-print articles from other newspapers. Both of them are really designed to be read on the journey to and from work so stories are short, very topical and there’s are not generally long complicated editorials or opinion pages. That can make them easily accessible if youa re also trying to learn Enlgish. If you want to read something else then you really have a number of choices to make – firstly whether the paper is a tabloid or a broadsheet and then which side of the political spectrum it is on. The tabloids are really like gossip magazines – lots of stories about celebrities, sports stars and a little news. You can find the Sun and the Mirror here! The broadsheets are generally much more serious – The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Independent being the best known and the most established. The Times for example was founded in 1785!  The Mail and the Express fall between the two – neither really one thing or the other. The Financial Times is a broadsheet but as the name suggests focuses pretty much on financial news.In the broadsheets you will find serious news reporting, International news, Financial news and Editorial comment as well as sports and reviews of arts and music for example. Politically the papers stand either on the right (conservative) – Telegraph, Times, Mail, Sun, express or on the left – Guardian, Mirror with the Independent sitting somewhere in the middle. There are also Sunday papers – many of the weekly titles producing a Sunday edition, but also with some other papers like the Observer (similar to the Guardian) and the News of the World (similar to the Sun). There are also lots of local newspapers which you’ll be able to get free or buy cheaply where you are  in London; these are also interesting and may mean more to you as they will be about you the local area.

At times like the present with an election coming up it’s easy to see how important it is for political parties to have the support of the papers – the Sun, for example has a regular readership of over 3 million – as does the News of the World. The papers are owned by a few groups or families and these people have a huge influence over information. For example the Sun, The News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times are all owned by News International (who also own Sky TV).

The papers also all have websites which are free (for the moment) for example The Guardian. News International is considering charging for access to information but as things stand at the moment it is free.

So .. no excuse not to be doing a bit of reading and getting a bit of information about the UK.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Learning English, UIC London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.