It felt appropriate to review The Times today. It's a nice contrast to The Sun, being an upmarket, politically moderate former broadsheet (now a 'compact', which is the same size as what is typically called a tabloid). Despite that though, The Sun and The Times are corporate siblings, both being owned by News International, which is in turn owned by the corporate goliath that is News Corporation.
Enough history, time for the newspaper. The banner headline here is "Speed limit to be cut in bid to save 1,000 lives" with a sub-headline of "Launch of ambitious road safety strategy". You may note this is considerably longer than The Sun's banner headline yesterday, and not in all-caps (the banner headlines for today and yesterday are exactly as they were, capitalization and all). It does seem more verbose and less 'shouty', which sets the tone for things to come. The article itself is long and informative, but seems rather too positive considering the proposals would significantly increase penalties for various offences, and give police the power to randomly stop and breath test drivers without needing any sort of suspicion. Such things are a bit unnerving to me, but don't seem to be questioned at all.
There's also further discussion of the next budget, which is interesting as it means I can contrast with The Sun. I feel The Sun was 'preaching to the choir', demanding spending cuts but taking it for granted that they were necessary. The Times is generally in agreement, but actually argues the point, and quite convincingly too. They too talk of cuts in the NHS and various other services, but there's also talk of the Conservatives proposing to fill a big hole in the deficit by killing off the replacement to the Trident nuclear submarine program (which would save £60 billion, a substantial sum), which was curiously not mentioned by The Sun.
The letters are different too, being more mini-articles (that all start with 'Sir,') than rants and raves. There's one about the on-going debate about whether or not to add fluoride to drinking water, two about further restrictions on tobacco, and two about the police and whether their tactics are too heavy-handed or not (one in support of the police, one not). Thought-provoking, but I can see many people complaining about them going on forever, which is where tabloids came from in the first place.
There's also a business section (interesting to me today since they're talking about Oracle's surprise acquisition of Sun, which I've been following elsewhere, I really expected IBM to buy Sun myself), a sports section (comprising 12 pages, compared to a combined total of 39 for The Sun and its GOALS supplement), plenty of puzzles and not even a whiff of a comic strip or anything as frivolous. The newspaper is 72 pages + 24 for 'The Times 2' supplement + 4 pages for part 2 of a serialization of Shadow Child (a novel by Libby Purves). This costs 90p, which even I think is a bit steep.
All in all, I liked The Times. I now see that 'compact' is not just what tabloids that don't want to be tabloids call themselves, it's a world away from The Sun, clearly different to The Daily Mail, and feels more like The Guardian in its overall style. It's somewhat to the right of where I am politically, but the writing is eloquent and persuasive enough that I do at least understand where they're coming from, even if I don't agree. I might just buy it again at some point.