Newspapers and magazines in Slovakia

Every day we need information, which we could take from tv, radio, newspapers, internet, atc. The oldest type of masmedia are newspapers, which are known from the invention of printing machine. There were not so many papers and magazines before 1989 and freedom of press did not exist. There was only Pravda, Smena, Práca, Roľnícke noviny and some magazines: Slovenka, Život. After 1989 we could see a huge development in newspapers industry. In the last years in Slovakia many dailies, weekly journals and other magazines and periodicals started.

Generally we should divide newspapers into two divisions:

„popular papers“- Nový čas ranks among them. This type of papers hardly publishes any serious material, there is a lot of information but very often non-serious and it is full of chats.

„quality dailies“- Sme, Národná obroda, Pravda which bring an independent views on politics. We have only one sports daily, Šport.

There are also issued magazines specialized on some human activities:

for sportsfans: Futbal, Victoria, Tenis

for motor road vehicles fans: Auto-moto žurnál, Stop

community magazines: Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Miau, Kankán

and a lot of magazines about communication technologies, for children, do it yourself workers, fishers, businessmen, shooters, crossword magazines…

Almost every town or region has its own lokal newspapers or another periodicals: Žilinský večerník, Bratislavské noviny, Bratislavský večerník and they are issued every week or every two weeks.

Generally almost every newspaper or magazine has main two parts: the cover and pages. Cover is usually printed in full colour, magazines have usually all pages in full colour too. Magazines are prefered by readers, because contain more pictures than papers. Among newspapers only Nový čas is printed in colour now.

On the cover there is heading, where there is the name of the newspapers and number and the date of issue, sometimes there is price too. The biggest headline is the most important information of the day, leading story and the photography with the caption, which invite us to read a story the photography is about. If you turn the page, you can see the editorial, which is written by the editor-in-chief. There is the date of issue, number of page and section in the heading of every page. The most important sections are domestic news, political news, world news, sports news, forecast and we could find here the crossword, fun, culture, TV guide, advertisement, annoucements.

On every page there are columns with headlines and articles divided into paragraphs and lines. Headlines have special grammatical structure to use words which sounds dramatic and quite short.

The newspapers and magazines can be bought in newsstands. In Slovakia we have almost 15 domestic newspapers, Nový čas has the biggest number of readers and about 50 domestic magazines. There is no problem to buy many newspapers and magazines from abroad: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The People, The Week and many more. They can broaden our outlook and should inform us what is going on all over the world. The power of press is enormous, it changes many lives in a bad or good way.