A good heading is very important because the first thing a reader looks at is the heading. It should be catch, short and sharp. It should also give us a taste of the story so we know what it’s about. Tabloids usually use puns or play around with words although they haven’t in this article. An example of a pun would be when Formula 1 racing driver Michael Schumacher crashed at 170mph head-on and still survived with a broken leg. ‘The Sun’ used the pun ‘Schoudini survives 170mph crash’. This pun is clever because it compares Schumacher with Houdini who was a magician that did death-defying tricks just like Schumacher who had just defied death by surviving a 170mph crash.
‘The Sun’ for this article used the heading ‘Sex taunt made axe monster murder 3 in love triangle’. This is an excellent heading because it tells us what happened, why it happened, what it happened with and who it happened to. This heading gives us a clear indication of the story and although it is not very short, it is sharp and effective.
The heading is in big, bold, black and underlined which immediately stands out from the rest of the page and this is good for catching a person’s eye for the article.
Unfortunately this article does not have a subheading probably because it is not the main story as it is on Pages 4 to 5. A subheading is there to break down text and make it easier to understand. This article is already understood by the main heading so there is no need for a subheading.
Then next to the heading there is a colour photo of the three victims and there is also a colour photo of the killer being led out of magistrates after being sentenced. There is also a gruesome photo of the weapons he used to murder his victims which include an axe, a knife and two chisels.
The title and the photos take up about 1 page while the other page is gull of text. The size of the heading text is about 18 while the text is about size ten. The heading sticks out mainly because it is white writing on a black background. There are about four sections, each with its own small title.
The layout is questionable to me because a lot of space is wasted through the photos. They could have made the photos smaller and they could have written more and a bit bigger because there is not a lot of writing about the actual story and the writing is very small.
The vocabulary is very simple but gruesome and this shows us that the paper is aimed at the working class. Most working class people work in very hard jobs which require a lot of physical effort and these kind of people are meant to be tough so that is why tough language is used e.g. ‘unimaginable savagery’, ‘butchering’ and they use slang words liked ‘gagged’. The first section is a summary of what happened and in the next section titled ‘Sarcastic’ it describes he killed Gillian because she taunted him about sex, so the sun is trying to get its viewpoint across to the public that it is a sarcastic thing to do, killing someone because they taunt you about sex.
The next section titled ‘Burglaries’ tells how he stole the credit card and was caught withdrawing cash from Mr Smith’s account. The third section is titled ‘Argument and it has comments from the judges and prosecutors while the final section is titled ‘Letters’ in which they say that Mr Hobbs wrote to his sister from jail and told her he ‘did it’.
The Guardian has a different way of presenting the story obviously because it is a different paper and the story is on the seventh page of The Guardian.
Its heading is also bold and is black on a white background. The size of the font is 16 and it is titled ‘Drifter admits appalling triple murder’ and there is a subheading titled ‘Court told of 24 hours of horror after drink and drugs binge’ which is about size 14 in a plain black font.
There is a lot of text in the article about the story and there are two long columns and three short columns. The font is a bit bigger than The Sun so it is easier to read. The language is less gruesome than The Sun although it does have ‘unimaginable savagery’; words like that are few and far between. The language is fairly simple probably because most of the text is quotes from police officers, the judge and the coroner although they are some difficult words to pronounce such as ‘amphetamines’ and ‘psychiatric’.
There is a large black and white photograph of the killer and three smaller black and white photographs of the victims directly beneath the killer’s photo.
I think the layout of the photographs is excellent because shows the killer sort of devouring his victims by having such a large photo compared to three smaller photos of his victims directly underneath him. Also having the photos in black and white makes it look scarier and usually once a person had been killed their photo is usually shown in black and white as a sign that they are no longer in this world or they are of the past.
I think that the heading in the Guardian does not stand out as much as in The Sun because it has a white background and black font, while The Sun had a black background and white font which in my opinion stood out more and the size of The Sun’s heading is larger than the Guardians.
Also the heading is not as detailed as The Sun’s because it only tells us what happened and who did it while The Sun’s heading gave more away about the story. I think this is used probably because The Guardian want people to read on to find out what the story is about while The Sun makes the readers decide if they want to read in more detail what the heading says.
The story is not that important to the Guardian so it is on page seven while The Sun has it on pages 4-5. The interesting thing is that the main story on the first page of the Guardian is not in the whole of The Sun while the main front story of The Sun is not in the whole of the Guardian!
The Sun uses a lot of ‘chatty’ language and they also use a lot of slang while the Guardian uses Standard English and has well-structured columns.
The Sun wastes too much space on the photos and had a lot of text that is irrelevant to the story. The Sun mentions that they made love before he killed her about three times in the article and it also describes in more detail about their lovemaking while the Guardian talks more about how the murder was committed and what happened and it also gives views from a variety of people unlike The Sun which has few quotes from other sources.
In my opinion the Guardian is a better paper to read because it gives readers different dimensions to the story while The Sun tells the viewers what it thinks. The Sun also has more slang because its target audience uses slang a lot while the Guardian’s audience use Standard English.
There was much more detail in the Guardian while The Sun had a lot of irrelevant text. The Guardian was well constructed and the photos were better although I think that The Sun’s heading was much better because it told you a lot about the article and the photo of the weapons made the story even more gruesome. Tabloid readers just want to know the story flat out and that’s it, while broadsheet readers want to know about the story from every angle. Overall a broadsheet reader will have a better understanding of the story than a tabloid reader although a tabloid reader will get better photographs and more gossip about the story because tabloids like gossiping while broadsheets are dead serious.
