In some countries as many as nine out of ten adults read at least one newspaper a day. Seen in purely business terms, few products can ever be so successful in reaching as much of their potential market. Why do so many people read newspapers? There are five basic functions of a newspaper: to inform, to comment, to persuade, to instruct and to entertain. You may well think that this list of functions is in order of importance but, if so, you would not be in agreement with the majority of the reading public. Of the two broad categories of newspaper, the popular and the quality, the former attracts a readership of millions, while the latter, only hundreds or thousands. Yet the popular papers seem largely designed for entertainment, with quizzes, competitions, cartoons and light-hearted human-interest stories. Their news coverage contains a lot of comment and persuasive language; the information content is rather low, and instruction is very minor. The quality newspapers put a much higher value on information and a much lower one on entertainment. It is not only in content that the two types of paper differ. There is a difference, too, in the style in which the articles are written. The popular papers generally use more dramatic language with a lot of world-play. Their journalists tend to use shorter sentences and avoid less well-known vocabulary. This means that popular newspapers are easier for a native speaker to understand, though probably not for a non-native speaker. In order to decide whether a newspaper is a quality or a popular one it is not even necessary to read it, since you can tell simply by the way it looks. Popular papers are generally smaller with fewer columns per page. They have bigger headlines and more photographs. There is a greater variety of typeface and printed symbols. The articles are shorter and there are few per page. Such devices are not only used to make the paper more attractive, but they may also influence what the reader reads. Large headlines, pictures and position on the page all serve to draw the reader’s attention to one article rather than another. Since popular newspapers have a much larger readership than the apparently more neutral quality papers, it may be fair to conclude that the average reader not only wants to be a newspaper, but prefers his reading to be guided and opinions given to him.