Fleet Street

Fleet Street is a street in London that used to be the centre of the Newspaper industry, and though most of the papers have moved to less central locations it is still used as a collective term for Britain's London based press.

Due to Britain's compact geography and centralised Politics Newspaper magnates have long realised that they can produce one newspaper in London that can be sold across the whole of England and Wales and in some cases beyond. This saves them the trouble and expense of covering regional or provincial news unless so many people die that its obviously more important than whatever is happening in London.

Due to the large size of this national newspaper market it has long supported a wider range of Newspapers than people are used to elsewhere in the English speaking world. This makes for an intensely competitive market where papers ruthlessly target a particular demographic based usually on a combination of Politics and information capacity/literacy. They also compete with journalistic scoops, marketing schemes and in some cases soft porn. The Sunday Market is radically different to the rest of the week and is characterised by larger sales and greater content.

Currently the main Fleet Street papers are:

Scotland
Being a long way from London, with a different legal system and now its own Parliament. Scotland has a long tradition of buying mostly Scottish Newspapers - principally the Daily Record.

London Papers
People from countries where the norm is to have city based Newspapers sometimes refer to Fleet St papers such as the Times as "the London Times". Brits consider this to be a classic colonial faux pas. The London Times arguably did once exist as something quite different to the Times, so in circumstance where it is necessary to identify that when you are talking about the Guardian, Telegraph or Observer and not abbreviating the name of your local paper it is safest to add the suffix "of London".

London does have its own newspapers, either freebies handed out at train stations such as the metro or the small local Evening newspaper market - currently only the Evening Standard struggle on in this niche.