I developed the habit of reading English newspapers and magazines as early as in 1996. As a junior member of the compilation team for The Supplement to The English-Chinese Dictionary (《英汉大词典补编》) which was compiled under the leadership of Prof. Lu Gusun, I was expected to read extensively and key in newspaper citations that might contain information on neologisms. The only English newspaper that I could get access to then was International Herald Tribune which, unfortunately, was renamed The International New York Times in October, 2013 and fully integrated with The New York Times three years later. I used to spend hours every day in the library, jotting down possible candidates for inclusion in the dictionary. Two years later, my efforts paid off, culminating in the creation of a computerized citation file that contained more than 200,000 words. Meanwhile, I was also responsible for sorting out the thousands of newspaper clippings mailed to us by our American colleague Thomas Creamer who went to great pains to highlight potential neologisms in the newspapers and magazines that he could lay his hands on. The supplement, virtually a dictionary of English neologisms, became an instant success when it was published in 1999, which emboldened me in my future word-watching effort through reading English newspapers and magazines. In the year 2000 when I was a Ph.D. candidate, Professor Lu, my supervisor, asked me to teach a news-reading course to junior students in the English department. Inexperienced in teaching as I was, I managed to pull it off with my own selection of interesting news articles and my enthusiasm for teaching. I continued to teach this course after I got my Ph.D. and became a lecturer in the English department in July, 2001. I have been teaching news-reading since then, only with a brief hiatus from July, 2003 to June, 2004. More than twenty years of reading and eighteen years of teaching motivated me to write a dictionary of words and expressions commonly used in journalistic texts (which will be published in 2019) and a textbook of news reading. I have been toying with the idea of writing my own textbook for news reading for years as I always find deficiencies or even mistakes in existing textbooks. As I believe, a textbook aimed at improving students’ reading skills and proficiency should include a wide range of newspaper or magazine articles, each of which should cover areas such as world news, politics, economy, entertainment, sports, technology, science, and health, and contain at least a dozen difficult words or expressions that may not discourage readers from reading on. Moreover, a well-designed set of exercises should be furnished. Finally, any information related to the journalistic and lexical features of news reports should be provided. With these in mind, I set out to comb through dozens of news websites and selected thirty pieces for this textbook. The textbook is comprised of fifteen units, each of which contains two articles, namely Text A and Text B. In each unit, topics for pre-reading discussions are provided at the beginning. In Text A which usually contains over 1,000 words, those useful words and expressions will be explained in detail, which is followed by questions, exercises, and information concerning journalistic and linguistic features of news reports. In Text B which contains about 700 to 900 words, a set of true or false questions has been supplied. For learners of English, reading English newspapers and magazines will not only improve their reading skills and language proficiency, but also broaden their scope of knowledge and expand their horizons. At the same time, through reading, they should also be encouraged to develop the ability to detect media bias and do critical thinking. Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian media guru, once said: “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.” It is the hope of the author that all readers could benefit from this textbook and enjoy reading the articles therein.