1) common knowledge
a) everyone knows it
b) some people know it
2) feature article a) an especially long article in a newspaper or a
magazine
b) an article about a feature film
3) comics a) people who are funny
b) set of drawings telling a short story
4) headline a) a name of a story in a newspaper printed in
large letters
b) the first line in a newspaper story
5) stock exchange a) a place where money is exchanged
b) a place where stocks, bonds and shares are
bought and sold
6) law court a) a place where people come to hear a law case
b) home of a king or a queen
7) readership a) newspapers and magazines read by the
people
b) people who read a newspaper or a magazine
8) football pool a) a game of football played by local teams
b) a kind of game in which people try to guess the
results of football matches, risking small sums
of money and getting much bigger sums if
they guess correctly
Answer the questions on the press.
1. What else do newspapers do besides reporting the news and interpreting it? 2. What kind of information can one find in a paper? 3. In what two different ways do papers treat information? 4. What do British people tend not to do compared with other newspapers? 5. How can you tell a popular paper from a serious one by looking at it? 6. What categories of newspapers can you name? How do you categorize them? 7. What is the symbol of the British Press and why? 8.Names of what quality papers and tabloids can you remember? 9. What are Sunday papers? 10. In what way do the British quality papers differ from most of Russian papers?
American Press
Because of the great size of the USA, local newspapers are more important than national ones. Only the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal are read over a large part of the country. But there are other newspapers that have a wide interest and influence; they include the Washington Post, the popular Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the St Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner. Most US newspapers are controlled by large monopolists.
The US press plays an important part in the business of government; the press conference is an American invention.
In the 20th century newspapers have ranged from tabloids featuring pictures and sensational news to, “responsible journals”. Their pages are varied and include columns devoted to news, editorials, letters to the editor, business and finance, sports, entertainment, art, music, books, comics, fashions, food, society, television and radio. As the great newspaper chains and news agencies grew, America’s press lost its individualistic character; many features are common to newspapers all over the country, which therefore have a uniform appearance.
Although there are no separate Sunday papers as there are in Great Britain, US daily papers do have special Sunday editions. Many of these are remarkable in size: the New York Times Sunday edition regularly has over 200 pages, and has had 946.
The New York Times has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the US, selling more than two million copies each day.
Aside from a few notable exceptions like the New York Times, the St Louis Post Dispatch, the Washington Post, the press is daily filled with sex and violence. It is a river of morbidity, murder, divorce and gang fights. It’s a mélange of chintzy gossip columns, horoscopes, homemaking hints, advice to the lovelorn, comics, crossword puzzles and insane features like: ”Are you happily married? Take the following test…”
Almost every American newspaper carries comic strips, usually at least a page of them.
In contrast to daily newspapers, many magazines in the USA are national and even international. Those with the widest circulation are Time, Reader’s Digest, TV Guide, Woman’s Day, Better Home and Gardens, Family Circle, the National Geographic Magazine and Ladies’ Home Journal.
(from The USA by G.D. Tomakhin, abridged)
Newspaper Wars
With so many modern forms of communication such as radio, TV and the Internet, newspaper companies now find it difficult to sell enough copies of their papers to survive. Many papers have a low circulation.
They use many methods to increase their circulation and to decrease the circulation of the other papers. Such strong competition has created the paper wars.
Newspaper companies use many methods to increase their circulation. One method is to offer cheap annual subscription; another is to sell a paper at a very low price for a month or two. Only big companies can afford this predatory pricing.
Newspapers also try to introduce new ideas. The problem is, however, that every time one company introduces a new idea, the other companies simply copy it!
(from BBC English)