Before reading the text answer the following questions.

· How popular is newspaper reading in our country?

· What different types of newspapers are there?

· What reading habits do people tend to have?

· What factors account for the decrease in the popularity of newspapers and the increase in magazine publishing?

You Awright, my Sun?

There is a crisis of confidence at the leading tabloids where circulations are shrinking. Now the Sun has launched a classy ad campaign.

There is something new under the Sun after all. For the first time in its super history, the paper is spending money on a television campaign that doesn't advertise specific editorial content or promote a money-winning competition.

From last night, a series of ads are being screened that do nothing more than present a series of images of the Sun being read by various groups of people. The only sound is a song which concludes with the refrain: "I tell you: only the strongest will survive." That Darwinist message apart, these ads signify a turning point for the Sun and, given that paper’s key importance, probably a turning point in British society too.

The Sun is trying to address a problem that is manifested in the plunging fortunes of the top tabloids, both daily and Sunday. There has to be a reason for such a decline. Daily titles have been losing sales and readers at an increasing rate for the past five years. The "mass market" is now an irrelevant term in newspapers. Fewer and fewer people are reading any paper, never mind more than one, on a daily basis. Many don't read papers at all. But the other awful truth facing the top tabloids is that those people who are still buying papers are trading up, choosing the Daily Mail or even the now accessible Times.

Newspapers reflect social change faster than any other consumer product and they reveal that we are all aspirational now. The top tabloids are seen variously as old-fashioned, reactionary and worthless. Most importantly, they are viewed as having lost their authority and credibility. They are not a badge to be worn by increasingly sophisticated consumers who can't be manipulated as easily as they seemed to be a decade ago. The Sun can't attract, let alone hold on to, 4 million buyers a day by running competitions and celebrity kiss-and-tell stories. All the old certainties are gone.

At one end, the Sun's audience is more cosmopolitan and, at the other, either apathetic or, more worryingly, illiterate. The more educated are going upmarket or preferring to read magazines, while the ill-educated are failing to read anything. Then there is the perpetual problem, faced by mature papers, of how to attract a younger, or at least new, audience without antagonising the older habitual buyers.

Hence the Sun's ad campaign which, it should also be said, is more than a recognition by the editorial team that their old tricks aren't working any longer. The ads do offer a fascinating insight into the Sun's dilemma: in the face of falling sales it is suggesting that the paper is a permanent fixture in every facet of British life. It seeks to reinforce its continuing importance as a "must read" in its traditional heartland, at the same time as it tries to plug into a new generation.

So in the ads we see the attempts to compare the opposites. These attempts seek to bridge the divide. Workers in heavy industry reading the paper during their meal break are contrasted with shirt-sleeved business types at lunch; elderly women in a hairdresser's pass the paper to younger women in a maternity clinic; and on it goes to a still younger woman having her bottom tattooed.

Anyway, these ads are not aimed at encouraging people to go out the next morning and buy the Sun. They are designed to enhance the Sun brand and to wipe out memories of its aggressiveness. These are warm and cuddly images. The Sun is shown as a friend dropping in rather than a confrontational paper. Every ad concludes with the slogan "Dedicated to the people of Britain".

But this ad campaign isn't a radical rethink of the Sun's agenda but a rather conservative attempt to suggest that the paper is cleaner, more wholesome, warmer and more credible than people might think.

The Guardian

Notes:

The Sun – a British tabloid daily newspaper. It generally supports the ideas of the Conservative party.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1337