Here, I am going to review the most popular red top (tabloid) paper with its average daily circulation of 2,821,618 copies in July 2011 - The Sun.
We can apply this copy of The Sun to what we learnt in the lecture today about the layout of certain papers. As you should know each story has a 'headline', in this case its 'Got the bastards', this is known as the 'standing head.' Our papers are written from left to right which is known as 'linear' and are written in the layout of columns known as 'modular' which means little boxes which allows the reader to choose what they would like to read. There is a clear separation between a writers 'comment' and the 'news' in newspapers, with the news usually being at the front of the newspaper (see p2 for comment..) This is important for Journalists as they need to distinguish between the comment and the news itself, so that their opinions aren't mistaken for the news. All the newspapers cover that day or the previous days news as it's what makes the paper newsworthy and people to want to read it. Most of the news in the papers is scheduled meaning that we know it will happen (believe it or not the news writers can't predict the days events before they happen!) Occasionally there is 'breaking news' which can't be covered by the newspapers until the following day however these are usually covered via other sources of the news such as online, the radio and the television news programmes.
As you can see The Sun always has adverts amongst its news. At the top of the page it is advertising for a 'dream team' (usually money is mentioned as well such as saving £5 here and there.) This is used to entice the reader and is produced by the features team who are not part of the news writers. The features team for newspapers usually produce the daily letters page, Sudoku and articles such as reviews which are planned beforehand and are written based on comment not news. The Editors letter is also the leading article in a newspaper and is part of the Journalists writing. News Journalists usually keep away from writing articles that produce 'comment' as they can be sued for 'malice' which means comments have been made or they have promoted a company above others. Although Journalists are entitled to write an advertising feature as long as they label it as a feature and not make it appear true by writing it as a news story. Hint: this also means that you can take 'freebies' offered by a company such as a holiday company as long as you don't write and promote it. But if you also take a freebie from its rival company, you can write a balanced account about them both as you are not making one appear better than the other!
1 comments:
Really good post Sophie, although when you explain malice you've mentioned malicious comments. You're right to say malice can be promotion of a company above others, but I would avoid using malicious comments as a way to descirbe it. Purely because it can either be good or bad comments of a company but what it mainly is, is good comments or advertisement of one company/person in particular and no mention of other companies. For example, Becky and I did a restaurant review for our latest feature and when we played the footage back, Chris explained that we had only talked of that one restaurant in our package and we hadn't atually compared it to any others, so this could be malice. There were no bad comments said at all, and that wasn't the issue. I hope this has helped a little.
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