New technology was about to wipe out the ancient craft of hot metal typesetting. Murdoch proposed a new printing plant with four titles under his roof at Wapping using the latest computer software. Reed Int, who are now owned by the Mirror, decided to sell up and sold the Mirror to Robert Maxwell in 1984 for a lump sum of 113.4million pound. Within a matter of months the Mirror lost 500.000 readers due to the untrustworthy reputation of Maxwell as a politician and a businessman. Maxwell was known as a ‘Socialist’, but the paper wasn’t concerned with the dismantling of the welfare state, workers rights and under funding of the Education sector. However, despite the loss in circulation, Maxwell turned around one million profit into 1million a week. With the death of Maxwell in 1991 it became clear he had looted the Mirror pension funds of up to 450million pounds.
David Montgomery was appointed Chief executive of the Mirror and sacked the old guard of Mirror Editors and journalists and replaced with old Sun and News Of The World workers from Murdoch’s papers. Kelvin Mackenzie was sacked from the Sun and moved to the Mirror and ran their LIVE TV channel with ‘topless darts’. When Montgomery took over, the distribution of the Mirror was 2.75 million, now its 2.3million, but he has made it more profitable by cutting costs. The directors running the Mirror are more concerned with the share price than the content. The paper’s primary function is to make money rather than challenge social justice and probe for truth. In 1986, Murdoch took his papers to Wapping in South London from Fleet Street. They all worked in one open plan office. Within months, Murdoch had increased profit by 40%. By 1987 the paper was making 1million pound a week for News International. The Sun’s profit was used to subsidies Sky Satellite TV station in 1989. Sky cost 300million pound to set up and lost 2million a week to begin with, but eventually after a period of time they regained the money.
Technology changed the way the public saw the news. When the internet was invented it almost made the newspapers obsolete, it changed there role in the world, newspapers aren’t just wasn’t just supplying news it shapes peoples opinions.
News is information about such events, reported in the mass media. The role of newspapers is to inform the public about what is going on across the globe. Our assignment was to produce a newspaper; either a tabloid or a broadsheet; we chose to do a Broadsheet. A tabloid is a newspaper (especially in the ) is the smaller of two standard newspaper sizes; the larger newspapers, associated with higher-quality journalism, are called Broadsheets. Broadsheet is a size and format for , and a descriptive term applied to papers which use that format rather than the smaller format. Broadsheets are twice the size of a standard tabloid. Historically, broadsheets were developed when; in a was placed on newspapers based on the number of their pages. Broadsheet newspapers tend to be more intellectual in content than their tabloid counterparts, examining stories in more depth and carrying and stories less often. However, while this distinction is widely used, some tabloid papers (particularly the and ) point out that the term "tabloid" strictly refers only to the paper size, and often use phrases such as "broadsheet quality in a tabloid format". Broadsheets often publish supplements, such as sports reviews and less news-oriented content (e.g. the Guardian's "G2" or the Times's "Times 2"), in tabloid format.
All newspapers use mastheads. A masthead is the name of the newspaper in question, e.g. The Daily Mirror or The Guardian. It usually uses a much larger print then the rest of the newspaper and can be in colour or in black and white. Just below the masthead is the earpiece, this is a small advertisement of the newspaper. Next to that is the price, which tells the reader how much the paper is, and sometimes can be the problem between rival companies, due to the battle for sales increase. Under that is the main headline, which is made up of short snappy phrases, which sum up what the article in question is about and these too are also much bigger, then the main body of the text.
Under all of this is the by-line. The by-line tells the reader whom the article is written by
and there job title, (e.g. editor). In every paper there’s a photo; this accompanies the majority of the article as a testament piece. Just below that is a small sentence that explains what or who is in the photograph is called the caption. Also on the newspaper is a banner, this tells the reader about the content of the newspaper. Then at the bottom of the newspaper is a brief, which tells the reader a few lines on what they can read about in further article in the paper itself.
In our newspaper we used all these conventions. Our masthead was Ascleption (Asclepion) which is a place in Ancient Egypt healing temple, this connotes the idea of if you read this paper you will feel healed. We used Edwardian Script because it looks intellectual because it’s fancy and grown up. The earpiece was advertising a competition to win money for a charity of your choice, and the price was 1.20. The main headline was ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’. the by-line says its by ‘Peter Antoniou Political Editor’. The photograph is of a caterpillar eating a leaf and the caption said ‘The Hungary Caterpillar’.
There are three different types of audiences for Tabloid and Broadsheet. Demographics are the average or typical characteristics of the people who buy your products or services. They are the type of audiences that read Tabloid papers because they have some sense of normality in there lives and they like to read about celebrities and happenings in the media. They include age, income, education, status or type of occupation, region of country and household size. Demographics can also include the age of children, home ownership, home value and urban or rural location.
Psychographics take this a step further. These are the types of audiences that read Broadsheets because they are more concern with political issues in today’s society instead of celebrities and happenings in the media that doesn’t concern them or the business they represent. These include people's lifestyles and behaviors; where they like to vacation, the kinds of interests they have, the values they hold and how they behave. They usually like to read about issues concerning government and stocks etc.
Finally there are Geodemographics; these are a classification by residential area and housing types. These types usually fall between Tabloids and Broadsheets they can read both types of newspapers. There are several systems, many of them based upon post- codes. ACORN, the best known system, has eleven mail groups. The are Agricultural areas, Modern family housing, Older housing of intermediate status, Poor quality older terraced housing, Better off council estates, Less well-off council estates, Poorest council estates, Multi-racial areas, Higher-status bob-family areas, Affluent suburban housing and Better off retirement areas.
In newspapers they can show you as respectable or appalling depending on the type of story you are involved in. They do this by showing their side of the side of the story, but only that side, they do not show the other side. They use emotive by using or by over exaggerating on parts that do not need exaggeration or sensationalized on the parts that already have been overstated on, and in doing so it becomes more vulgar. Broadsheets usually have more writing then it does pictures. The picture takes up very little of the space unlike a Tabloid which have more pictures then writing. In our newspaper we concentrated on Political issues such as GM Crops. I don’t think that newspapers give a completely fair picture of reality because one newspaper tells us one side of the story and another newspaper tells us a different us something completely different. So we, the public don’t know what to believe, if we should believe any part of the story. It also depends on who writes it because they could be politically bias or used different types of words and slants to connote good or bad.
Audiences, on the whole, tend to rely on the news as a reliable source of information. They then trust the information they are receiving and do not think of the other sides. They see it as if they say it, it must be true. This usually isn’t the case. A lot of newspapers when they get there hands on a story add their own little twist to the story. They choose the newspaper that they are more likely to be represented in; also they pick the paper that they personally enjoy reading due to the articles and points of views from others.
In our newspaper we used cropping to make a field of crops look smaller then the actual size, because our story was on overgrown GM Crops. We did this by cropping down the original picture to make it seem smaller then usual. The effect of cropping is to make the subject look better and bigger or to down size it and make it small and unworthy. It was my task to edit some of the paper after the original copy had been given in. so I had to change and re-write some of it, swap some bits around and change the vocabulary to make it more fitting with that particular subject, to end up with the final copy as good as it could possibly be. In newspapers they can portray a hero as someone who is looking superb and anchor or crop any of the pictures, but on the other hand they can portray a villain as someone who is dark, dingy and just plain evil to fit the certain criteria for that particular article. Just by anchoring or cropping that picture for that particular article it can have two very different kinds of effects, dependent on the result required for that publication. For example a model advertising a magazine could be made to look younger/ sexier as happened recently when Kerry McFadden recently posed for a leading magazine; for a glamour picture, and threaten to sue the magazine when they airbrushed out the bikini she was wearing on the front cover suggesting that she was nude, when she had vowed never to never appear naked in a magazine.
In the editorial page there in lies the editor’s opinion, but ours was split into two sections. The first section has the editor’s opinion and the other half of the section would’ve had the public’s opinion. So people who were reading the paper could also get there say on the matter at hand, because in my opinion the public have a right to get involved in the political issue when it concerns them and also the audience creates a sense of relationship. In our newspaper we advertised a charity. We thought that if people could see that in this paper you could help others just by purchasing this newspaper then it might persuade them more and more readers to buy this paper, this is societal conscious audience. This paper relates to the business people and more middle class people, C1 audience. Our newspaper is aimed at the psychographics (advertising standards that are upper middle class. Or lower classes sense they need escapism. That’s why there are more celebrity stories.). This is because Broadsheets are aimed at the more business, upper class people, professional and administrators etc, because it has political issues and more business materials that normal day –to-day people wouldn’t care about as much, if at all.
In conclusion I think that the articles and the pictures related to articles are the strongest part of this assignment. One problem that we came across was the spelling and grammatical mistakes which were unobserved even after our proof reader had checked her work. The writing is more complex then a normal newspaper, so we had to put more effect into it, i.e. use correct grammar and vocabulary and get the right kind of picture to fit in with the story to make it seem like a proper Broadsheet. I think that we could have improved the layout and the advertisements. They could’ve been bit more bolder and brighter to grab the readers and buyers attention, this means that if the paper was to be published in today’s society it would pull in more readers which in the long run means more money. I thought that we did display political bearing of our newspaper quite correctly.
