Newspaper facts for kids
A newspaper is a publication printed on paper and issued regularly, usually once a day or once a week. It gives information and opinions about current events and news. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports, art, and science. They often include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, obituaries, birth notices, crosswords, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and advice columns.
Contents
Overview
Newspapers are typically published daily or weekly. General-interest newspapers typically publish news articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news. The news includes political events and politicians.", business and finance, crime, weather, and natural disasters; health and medicine, science, and computers and technology; sports; and entertainment, society, food and cooking, clothing and home fashion, and the arts.
Usually, the paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings (labelled A, B, C, and so on, with pagination prefixes yielding page numbers A1-A20, B1-B20, C1-C20, and so on). Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing editorials written by an editor (or by the paper's editorial board) and expressing an opinion on a public issue, opinion articles called "op-eds" written by guest writers (which are typically in the same section as the editorial), and columns that express the personal opinions of columnists.
Most newspapers are businesses. Some newspapers are government-run or at least government-funded. The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers or a government. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.
Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls, also subscribe to news agencies (wire services) (such as the Associated Press, Reuters, or Agence France-Presse), which employ journalists to find, assemble, and report the news, then sell the content to the various newspapers. This is a way to avoid duplicating the expense of reporting from around the world. c. 2005, there were approximately 6,580 daily newspaper titles in the world selling 395 million print copies a day (in the U.S., 1,450 titles selling 55 million copies).
Definitions
Newspapers typically meet four criteria:
- Public accessibility: Its contents are reasonably accessible to the public, traditionally by the paper being sold or distributed at newsstands, shops, and libraries, and, since the 1990s, made available over the Internet with online newspaper websites.
- Periodicity: They are published at regular intervals, typically daily or weekly.
- Currency: Its information is as up-to-date as its publication schedule allows. Online newspapers can be updated as frequently as new information becomes available, even several times per day, which means that online editions can be very up-to-date.
- Universality: Newspapers covers a range of topics, from political and business news to updates on science and technology, arts, culture, and entertainment.
History
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In Ancient Rome, Acta Diurna, or government announcement bulletins, were produced. They were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places. In China, early government-produced news-sheets, called Dibao, circulated among court officials during the late Han dynasty (second and third centuries AD). Between 713 and 734, the Kaiyuan Za Bao ("Bulletin of the Court") of the Chinese Tang dynasty published government news; it was handwritten on silk and read by government officials. In 1582, there was the first reference to privately published newssheets in Beijing, during the late Ming dynasty.
Newspapers developed in the 17th century as information sheets for merchants. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers.
In Boston in 1690, Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. This is considered the first newspaper in the American colonies even though only one edition was published before the paper was suppressed by the government. In 1704, the governor allowed The Boston News-Letter to be published and it became the first continuously published newspaper in the colonies. Soon after, weekly papers began being published in New York and Philadelphia. These early newspapers followed the British format and were usually four pages long. They mostly carried news from Britain and content depended on the editor's interests. In 1783, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first American daily.
Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. With the popularity of the Internet, many newspapers are now digital, with their news presented online as the main medium that most of the readers use, with the print edition being secondary (for the minority of customers that choose to pay for it) or, in some cases, retired. The decline of newspapers in the early 21st century was at first largely interpreted as a mere print-versus-digital contest in which digital beats print. The reality is different and multivariate, as newspapers now routinely have online presence; anyone willing to subscribe can read them digitally online.
Categories
Frequency
- A daily newspaper is printed every day, sometimes with the exception of Sundays and occasionally Saturdays (and some major holidays). Saturday and, where they exist, Sunday editions of daily newspapers tend to be larger, include more specialized sections (e.g., on arts, films, entertainment) and advertising inserts, and cost more. Typically, the majority of these newspapers' staff members work Monday to Friday, so the Sunday and Monday editions largely depend on content made in advance or content that is syndicated. Most daily newspapers are sold in the morning. Afternoon or evening papers, once common but now scarce, are aimed more at commuters and office workers.
- Some newspapers are published two times a week and are known as semi-weekly publications.
- As the name suggests, a triweekly publishes three times a week. The Meridian Star is an example of such a publication.
- Weekly newspapers are published once a week, and tend to be smaller than daily papers.
- Some publications are published, for example, fortnightly (or biweekly). They may have a change from normal weekly day of the week during the Christmas period depending the day of the week Christmas Day is falling on.
Geographical scope and distribution
- A local newspaper serves a region such as a city, or part of a large city. Almost every market has one or two newspapers that dominate the area.
- Most nations have at least one newspaper that circulates throughout the whole country: a national newspaper. Some national newspapers, such as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, are specialised (in these examples, on financial matters). There are many national newspapers in the United Kingdom, but only a few in the United States and Canada. In Canada, The Globe and Mail is sold throughout the country. In the United States, in addition to national newspapers as such, The New York Times is available throughout the country.
- There is also a small group of newspapers which may be characterized as international newspapers. Some, such as The New York Times International Edition, (formerly The International Herald Tribune) have always had that focus, while others are repackaged national newspapers or "international editions" of national or large metropolitan newspapers.
Subject matter
General newspapers cover all topics, with different emphasis. While at least mentioning all topics, some might have good coverage of international events of importance; others might concentrate more on national or local entertainment or sports. Specialised newspapers might concentrate more specifically on, for example, financial matters. There are publications covering exclusively sports, or certain sports, horse-racing, theatre, and so on, although they may no longer be called newspapers.
Format
Most modern newspapers are in one of three sizes:
- Broadsheets: 600 mm × 380 mm (23+1⁄2 in × 15 in), generally associated with more intellectual newspapers, although a trend towards "compact" newspapers is changing this. Examples include The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom.
- Tabloids: half the size of broadsheets at 380 mm × 300 mm (15 in × 11+3⁄4 in), and often perceived as sensationalist in contrast to broadsheets. Examples include The Sun, The National Enquirer, The Star Magazine, New York Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and The Globe.
- "Microdaily" is infrequently used to refer to a tabloid-sized free daily newspaper that offers lower ad rates than its broadsheet competitors. The content of a microdaily can range from intense local news coverage to a combination of local and national stories.
- Berliner or Midi: 470 mm × 315 mm (18+1⁄2 in × 12+1⁄2 in) used by European papers such as Le Monde in France, La Stampa in Italy, El País in Spain and, from 2005 until 2018, The Guardian in the United Kingdom.
Newspapers are usually printed on cheap, off-white paper known as newsprint. Since the 1980s, the newspaper industry has largely moved away from lower-quality letterpress printing to higher-quality, four-color process, offset printing. In addition, desktop computers, word processing software, graphics software, digital cameras and digital prepress and typesetting technologies have revolutionized the newspaper production process. These technologies have enabled newspapers to publish color photographs and graphics, as well as innovative layouts and better design.
To help their titles stand out on newsstands, some newspapers are printed on coloured newsprint. For example, the Financial Times is printed on a distinctive salmon pink paper, and Sheffield's weekly sports publication derives its name, the Green 'Un, from the traditional colour of its paper. The Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport is also printed on pink paper while L'Équipe (formerly L'Auto) is printed on yellow paper.
Circulation and readership
The number of copies distributed, either on an average day or on particular days (typically Sunday), is called the newspaper's circulation and is one of the principal factors used to set advertising rates.
A common measure of a newspaper's health is market penetration, expressed as a percentage of households that receive a copy of the newspaper against the total number of households in the paper's market area. In the 1920s, on a national basis in the U.S., daily newspapers achieved market penetration of 123 percent (meaning the average U.S. household received 1.23 newspapers). As other media began to compete with newspapers, and as printing became easier and less expensive giving rise to a greater diversity of publications, market penetration began to decline.
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Newspaper vendor, Paddington, London, February 2005
Advertising
A newspaper typically generates 70–80% of its revenue from advertising, and the remainder from sales and subscriptions. The portion of the newspaper that is not advertising is called editorial content, editorial matter, or simply editorial.
Newspapers in countries with easy access to the web have been hurt by the decline of many traditional advertisers. Department stores and supermarkets could be relied upon in the past to buy pages of newspaper advertisements, but due to industry consolidation are much less likely to do so now. Additionally, newspapers are seeing traditional advertisers shift to new media platforms.
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1938 Dutch newspaper advertisement for women's clothing sold at C&A stores
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US newspaper advertising revenue—Newspaper Association of America published data
Journalism
Since newspapers began as a journal (record of current events), the profession involved in the making of newspapers began to be called journalism. In the yellow journalism era of the 19th century, many newspapers in the United States relied on sensational stories that were meant to anger or excite the public, rather than to inform. The restrained style of reporting that relies on fact checking and accuracy regained popularity around World War II. Criticism of journalism is varied and sometimes vehement. Credibility is questioned because of anonymous sources; errors in facts, spelling, and grammar; real or perceived bias; and scandals involving plagiarism and fabrication.
In the past, newspapers have often been owned by so-called press barons, and were used for gaining a political voice. After 1920 most major newspapers became parts of chains run by large media corporations such as Gannett, The McClatchy Company, Hearst Corporation, Cox Enterprises, Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, Morris Communications, The Tribune Company, Hollinger International, News Corporation, Swift Communications, etc. Newspapers have, in the modern world, played an important role in the exercise of freedom of expression. Whistle-blowers, and those who "leak" stories of corruption in political circles often choose to inform newspapers before other mediums of communication, relying on the perceived willingness of newspaper editors to expose the secrets and lies of those who would rather cover them. However, there have been many circumstances of the political autonomy of newspapers being curtailed. Recent research has examined the effects of a newspaper's closing on the reelection of incumbents, voter turnout, and campaign spending.
Opinions of other writers and readers are expressed in the op-ed ("opposite the editorial page") and letters to the editors sections of the paper. Some ways newspapers have tried to improve their credibility are: appointing ombudsmen, developing ethics policies and training, using more stringent corrections policies, communicating their processes and rationale with readers, and asking sources to review articles after publication.
Impact of television and Internet
By the late 1990s, the availability of news via 24-hour television channels and the subsequent availability of online journalism posed an ongoing challenge to the business model of most newspapers in developed countries. Paid newspaper circulation has declined, while advertising revenue—the bulk of most newspapers' income—has been shifting from print to social media and news websites, resulting in a general decline. One of the challenges is that a number of online news websites are free to access. Other online news sites have a paywall and require paid subscription for access. In less-developed countries, cheaper printing and distribution, increased literacy, a growing middle class, and other factors have compensated for the emergence of electronic media, and newspaper circulation continues to grow.
Archives
In the web era, digital archives have been continually supplanting earlier microform and hard copy archives, and the latter two media have increasingly been digitized via image scanning, usually in concert with optical character recognition.
Images for kids
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Edition of DeNieuwe Tijdinghe dated 1619
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Person reading a newspaper
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The front page of the Helsingin Sanomat ("Helsinki Times") on July 7, 1904
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International newspapers on sale in Paris, France
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Soldiers in an East German tank unit reading about the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 in the newspaper Neues Deutschland
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The newsroom of Gazeta Lubuska in Zielona Góra, Poland
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The office building of Tyrvään Sanomat in Sastamala, Finland
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The Telegraph Printing House in Macon, Georgia circa 1876
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A newsboy in 1905 selling the Toronto Telegram in Canada
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See also
In Spanish: Periódico para niños
- List of newspaper comic strips
- List of online newspaper archives
- Lists of newspapers
- Off stone
- Media studies
