The Sun will have the lowest language level evidenced in the newspaper, and will have the smallest measure of spread in word length.
- The Guardian will have a language level set between the Sun and the Economist.
- The Economist will have the highest language level in terms of word length.
- I predict that The Economist will have the best value in terms of size, cost and number of pages.
First I shall investigate the amounts of space devoted to the different items, the sizes, number of pages and cost of the different newspapers; so that I can see what type of news/information is each newspapers priority.
So that I can compare the amount of space devoted to the different items I have split up the newspapers into seven sections:
- News
- Reviews
- Entertainment
- Advertisements
- Sport
- Business
- Weather
- Other
I will start by counting the pages in the different sections of the newspapers, and then work out what percentage of the newspaper they take up. I have noticed that most of the pages have more than one type of news, for example, half news and half advertisements, so I have decided to split the pages into halves, for accuracy. I will then divide the number of half pages by two, to work out the total number of pages dedicated to each section.
The Sun
The Guardian
The Economist
The Percentages of the different sections in the News papers, including the mean newspaper:
I have chosen to use a line graph to present this data as it allows me to see clearly the data I have collected, so that I can compare the information in this part of the investigation easily.
A Line Graph displaying the percentages of different sections in the newspapers, including the “Mean of the newspapers”;
Observations:
The Data from each of the newspapers seem to form the same shape on the line graph.
The percentage of Advertisements in each of the newspapers is higher than in any of the other sections, with news following closely behind.
The percentage of Weather information is very low in all of the newspapers, this is probably because there is a not a lot to write about the temperature and climate of England.
The Sun has the highest percentage of Advertisements and the lowest percentage of weather.
The Guardian has the highest percentage of Advertisements, news and sport, and the lowest percentage of reviews.
The Times has the highest percentage of News and Business information, and the lowest percentage of Entertainment.
The Guardian appears to be the most valuable newspaper in terms of News content, although the Times come very shortly after.
Now I shall compare the newspapers, in terms of size, number of pages and cost of the different newspapers. From the data I collect I shall work out the mean of the newspapers. I have chosen to work out the mean of the newspapers because the mean uses all of the data and gives a more accurate average with this type of data.
To do this I shall collect the following data from the newspapers:
- Cost
- Sheet size
- the number of pages
- Total surface area
- Cost per page
- Cost per cm²
Observations:
The best-valued newspaper in terms of cost per cm² is the Sun, the Economist is next in line, and then the Guardian, but if you consider the number of pages and cost per page then also the Sun is the best-valued newspaper.
The Guardian’s cost and the Sun’s cost per page is closest to the Mean,
The Sun’s size and the page number are closest to the mean.
For the last part of my investigation am going to analyse the readability, in terms of language levels, evidenced in the different newspapers.
I shall do this by looking at word length and sentence length in one article from each of the newspapers, which is about the same topic, so I can observe how the different newspapers tackle that topic.
And Bunch of jokers, I have decided to analyse articles on that topic.
The first sets of data I shall collect are the length of the words in the articles; I will use all of the words in the articles.
The Sun: Lone star Beckham.
The Guardian: Lone star Beckham.
The Economist:
I am going to use Cumulative frequency curves and box plots to display this data, as they show you clearly the median, lower quartile, upper quartile and interquartile range of the data.
I am also going to work out the standard deviation of the data I have collected, as it is a good way of measuring the spread, as it takes into consideration all of the data.
A large measure of spread will show a higher language level, because every sentence needs small words such as “a”, “it”, “and”, “the” and “I” to make sense, and a large measure of spread would show that there are words with a lot of letters as well. A small measure of spread would show that the word length is not varied that much, but it may mean that either the words were all mostly short, mostly long, or somewhere in-between. So I will have to look at the frequency of word length shown in the tables I did earlier to back up my conclusions.
The formula for working out standard deviation is:
Standard deviation= √∑(x-x) ²
But I am going to use a table to work out my answers, as it will take less time, but it is still has the same principle.
The Sun:
The Guardian:
The Economist:
Now I shall look at the words per sentence, this will help me analyse the readability, I am assuming that the longer the sentence, the higher the language level that is required reading it.
The Sun:
The Guardian:
The Economist:
I have also chosen to use Cumulative frequency curves to show this data as well, as it displays the quartiles clearly.
See next pages for Cumulative frequency curves.
Observations:
All of the Box plot diagrams for each newspaper are positively skewed.
The Sun has the smallest interquartile range for letters per word.
The Guardian has the highest interquartile range and upper quartile for letters per word.
The Economist has the highest median and lower quartile for letters per word.
The Sun has the smallest measure of spread and the lowest mean for letters per word.
The Guardian has the highest mean and the largest measure of spread for letters per word.
The Economist has values for letters per word between The Sun and The Guardian.
The Sun has the highest median and lower quartile for words per sentence.
The Guardian has the lowest median, lower quartile, upper quartile and interquartile range out of all of the newspapers, for words per sentence.
The Economist has the highest upper quartile and interquartile range for words per sentence.
The Average Newspaper:
Summary and Final Conclusion:
I think I used the right the strategies to investigate the newspapers.
By working out the percentages of each section in the newspapers it was easy for which sort of information is priority to the different type of newspaper. By doing this I was able to find out the following information:
- All of the newspapers contained mostly advertisements, and as newspapers can charge quite a lot to publish an advert, they are probably the newspapers main source of income, and this is what keeps their prices low.
Other than advertisements, the newspapers had the following priorities:
- The Sun’s main priority would seem to be Weather, as there are a higher percentage of pages in that section.
- The Guardian’s main priority is News and Sport, according to the percentage of pages shown in each of the sections.
- The Economist priorities would seem to lie with News, sport and business.
My first hypothesis for this part of the investigation was almost correct; The Sun did have the highest percentage of Entertainment out of all of the newspapers, but not the highest percentage of advertisements. My second hypothesis was mostly wrong, apart from having weather and business percentages closest to the mean. I have learnt that just because the Guardian is in-between the Sun and the Economist in terms of Class, it does not necessarily mean that it is closest to being the Average newspaper. This lesson also applies to the next hypothesis I made, which was saying that the Times will have a higher percentage of News because it is aimed at the Business and Professional classes; however it did have the highest percentage of Business news, which is as I predicted.
For the Second part of my investigation, I used the only method I could think of to compare the newspapers in terms of size, number of pages and cost of the newspapers. By simply drawing a table containing this information, I was able to compare them easily and work out what properties the Mean of the newspapers would have. I also managed to work out the best-valued newspaper out of all three, which was The Economist, this matches the hypothesis I made, however it is not entirely accurate as the newspapers have different types of information on each page, so it does not tell me which is the best valued newspaper in terms of the actual News and Information.
For the Last part of the investigation, I think I chose the best way of analysing the data that I could. To analyse the readability and language levels in the articles I chose, I looked at word length and sentence length. The only problem with doing this is that the difficulty of understanding a word can not be judged by the length of word, as there are plenty of long words which are easy to understand, for example “because, television, newspapers, information, arrangements”, but of course there are many long words which are harder to understand. So the method I chose was not entirely accurate. The only way I think I could have analysed the articles more accurately is if I had taken a sample of words form the articles, and conducted a survey to see whether people found the words easy or difficult to understand. There is the same problem with analysing words per sentence, but I don’t know of any other way I could have tackled this part of the investigation.
Using standard deviation to measure the spread of the word length, I think was the best way of tackling that part of the investigation, as it took into consideration all of the data I had collected and it made it easier for me to analyse the language levels. I had worked out that a large measure of spread would show a higher language level, and that a small measure of spread would show that the word length is not varied that much, but it may mean that either the words were all mostly short, mostly long, or somewhere in-between. By working out the standard deviation I was able to work out the following information:
- The Sun had the smallest measure of spread and the lowest mean for letters per word, which shows us that it has the lowest language level out of all of the newspapers, this corresponds with the hypothesis I made about measure of spread for the Sun.
- The Guardian has the highest mean and the largest measure of spread for letters per word, showing that it has the highest language level out of all the newspapers which proves the hypothesis I made, about the Economist having the highest language level in terms of word length, wrong.
- The Economist standard deviation values are in-between those of the Sun and The Guardian. This proves the hypothesis i made wrong.
The hypotheses I made for this part of the investigation were on the right track, only my hypotheses for the Guardian and the Sun turned out to be the opposite way round to how I had expected.