For our ordinary life are very important informations. We need informations about local, home and international political, social and sporst events. The biggets and most important sources of information are mass media. To mass media belong nawspapers, radio,television and internet.
Newspaper
In Britiain the national newspapers are very important. There are some very good local newspapers, but most people read one of the main national newspapers.
The most popular newspapers are the tabloids. They usually have a lots of big pictures, the articles are not very long, they use strip-cartoons and humorous drawnings reacting to some political events. Tabloid papers don´t have many serious articles, but have lots of stories about sex, scandals, famous people and the royal family. They also have big sports sections, lot of information about TV programmes, advertisements, competitions about pop stars and some home news. The two best-selling tabloid newspapers are the Sun and the Mirror. They sell around four or five million copies a day. Another tabloid is the Daily Mail, which is more serious than the other two papers.
There are four main quality papers or ´broadsheets´. Fewer people read these. Quality newspapers contain a great variety of national and international news, reports from parliamentary debates, reviews of the arts, features about fashion, sport and businnes news. The articles are longer and more serious and they have fewer pictures. The oldest and most famous quality newspaper is The Times. It is not a governmet newspaper as many foreingers believe. It is an independent paper, which brings long, serious editorials presenting independent views on politics. The Times has three weekly supplements which are published and sold separately: The Times Literary Supplement, The Times Education Supplement and The Times Higher Education Supplement. There is the Financial Times, which publishes businnes news, stock exchange news and also famous art reviews. The best selling broadsheets nowadays, though, are the Telegraph and the Guardian.
In Britain beside these, there are many weekly and monthly magazines for women and teenage girls, for people interested in various kinds of sports and hobbies, such as yachting, tennis, football, hockey, model railways, gardening, cars, etc.
Radio
The first radio was discovered in 1886 by an German physicst Henrich Herty. In those times was the quality of broadcasting very low and there were no more than two radios in the country. But now, broadcasting in U.K. is provided by BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the quality of broadcasting is very high and there are more than 20 000 radios around the world.
In slovak republic we have approximate 20 radios. The radios have their own transmitter and with help of satelite in space they can broadcast. There are different kinds of radios: 1. state radios (Slovensko 1, Rebecca,…) 2. private independent radios (Fun radio, Okej, Twist, Express,…) 3. local radios (Tatry, Trenčan,…)
Radios are broadcasting a lot of different programmes: education and entertaiment programmes, quizes, dicussions, commentaries, music charts, competitions, etc. Some programmes consist only of music, that the listeners wish. The proportion of broadcastet music and spoken word in programmes is 70 %-30 %. The radios are broadcasting every day in the same time the most important news in shortcuts. The style of them on state radios is very formal, on private radios their style is not so formal (Twist) and they are given by funny way (on Fun radio). The private radios have got a lot of advertisements. The state radios don´t broadcast so much advertisements.
The broadcasting in U.K. is provided by BBC, which has 4 TV and 4 radio channels. 1st channel presents almost news and information programmes, 2nd and 3rd are for light programmes like radio soap operas, competitions, entertainig programmes, etc, and the last one presents cultural programmes. In Great Britain are nation and independent radios. The radio broadcasting structure is similar with that one in Slovakia.
A lot of people listen to radio. I think, that listening to radio is not so big waste of time like watching TV, because you can do many things while you are listening. Radio is a very good source of music and various information, too. But what I don´t like is enormous number of adverisements.