British journalism has features I’m not quite comfortable with. Take, for example, the tendency to diss competing news sources. Now that is nothing we all hadn’t seen before. Many columnists spend their lives bitching about how stupid other people and therefore also other journalists are. It is at times irritating and at times entertaining. All in all, good clean wholesome fun.

But what is this thing with putting down people who read other papers? Exhibit A: Spouting off enough cynical leftisms to give the average Daily Mail reader an aneurysm, writes Niall Doherty in The Fly, a free pop magazine. This sort of stereotyping is quite common. ”People who read tabloids are scum” vs. ”only upper-class gits bother with the broadsheets”. Somehow it still doesn’t feel very insulting, possibly because I’m prone to doing the same thing myself, especially with ”women’s magazines”.

Exhibit B: I wonder how many Guardian readers are aware of where their icon stood on this matter, writes Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times. This commentary, in turn, left me baffled. If, as is often touted, UK is one of the few countries where there’s actual day-to-day competition between newspapers (see for example an article in the last issue of the Independent on Sunday), why does a writer go to such lengths to make sure no Guardian reader will want to switch papers? Why doesn’t he target the editors or the published, but the reader? Looks like bad thinking to me.

And why is it that that one sentence felt so insulting to me. Aha, says the clever reader, it is obviously because you think of yourself as a Guardian reader who idolizes Hillary Clinton! Well, might be. Another matter altogether is that Mr. Sullivan actually makes a classic mistake in his argument, the so-called ”all animals are dogs” fallacy. People who read the Guardian very likely include some who do indeed idolize Ms. C. and did not know what she was up to. That doesn’t mean, however, that every reader thought the same.

I know I’m nitpicking again, but tell me this: how can someone write an opening sentence like Like many people, this column is tiring? Just wondering.

Three Sunday broadsheets: The Observer (ie. The Guardian), The Independent on Sunday (ie. The Independent) and The Sunday Times (ie. The… oh you got the idea already?). The price: £3.90. The processed pulp: 306 broadsheet-sized pages in 16 (!) sections, 136 tabloid-sized pages in five sections and 424 magazine-sized pages.

In approximate broadsheet terms that sums up to 374 pages, over 100 pages more than in the three Saturday papers. The combined total of these six titles bought over just two days is over 650 broadsheet pages, or three weeks worth of regional Finnish weekday newspapers. So if you wondered why I’m writing this so late, there’s your explanation.

Also, my back hurts.

That’s the combined price of the three Saturday broadsheets I bought today, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times. For that price, you get 182 broadsheet pages in over half a dozen sections, 196 pages in tabloid pull-outs and 396 pages in the weekend magazines. Oh, and a promotional DVD. Assuming a broadsheet page is twice the size of a tabloid one and that a magazine page is approximately 2/3 of a tabloid page, the grand total is nearly 300 broadsheet pages. That’s about ten times the amount of a Finnish weekday broadsheet.

So logically I would need to spend a week and a half reading these. But unfortunately that isn’t possible, because the Sunday papers are even bigger. How big? Find out tomorrow.