London’s tawdry tabloids turn upmarket

The Sun tabloid.

When the upmarket Guardian newspaper, which has a classical music critic, grumbled that the opera house had never helped other newspapers this way, the Sun retorted in classic fashion: Guardian readers “can have a night in with their mung bean sandwiches and discuss existentialist feminism. We’ll be down the opera having a knees-up.” Translation: mung beans are trendy vegetarian fare; a knees-up is a party.

British tabloids are hatching all sorts of schemes to woo new readers, including this one in which the Sun ran a lottery aimed at upscale Londoners, giving the winners deep discounts for opera tickets.

Class shift, the rise of give-away newspapers and privacy rulings by courts all seem to be putting extra pressure on the papers, which are loved and loathed, renowned for their sometimes adroit, sometimes atrocious puns and their steady diet of sex, sports, crime and celebrity.

Readership of high-end British newspapers has fallen about 8 percent since the 1970s, according to the National Readership Survey, a market poll used widely in the industry. The tabloids, known here as “red tops” for the red banner at the top of the paper, have fallen 34 percent.

Preoccupied with class but uneasy talking about it, Britons have long used newspapers as an indicator of social status. Buying a newspaper is kind of like wearing a badge, said Roy Greenslade, a journalism professor at City University. In their heyday in the 1950s and `60s, clutching a tabloid such as the Mirror, which sold as many as 5 million copies a day, was a way of saying, “I’m working class and proud.”

Postwar Britain was largely working class, and the tabloids deftly rode the wave, Greenslade said. But as the country became richer and workers moved from the factory floor to the trading floor, a middle class emerged and people switched to midmarket and upmarket papers.

The recent rise of giveaway papers known as freesheets has also eaten into the tabloids’ franchise. Gone are the days when London streets reverberated with Cockney accents shouting out tabloid news headlines. Today’s street distributors are every inch as effective as they thrust free papers at passersby. In July, three London freesheets - the Metro, Thelondonpaper and London Lite - boasted a combined circulation of 1.65 million daily.

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