KM Extra
This is a weekly free newspaper that is funded solely by advertisements. It therefore contains very little news but is largely made up of adverts and pictures. It is also produced on inferior quality newsprint.
- Value For Money
Most newspapers vary in size and the number of pages printed. They also vary in price. This can affect the number of people buying a specific newspaper. I will look at the correlation between the different prices and sizes and try to draw a conclusion as to which one is the best value for money.
At first glance, it would appear that the km extra is the best value for money because it is free. What has not been taken into consideration is the amount of information included and the type of information contained.
- Pictures
Photographs and pictures are necessary for visual stimuli and they add an extra dimension to the article.
I will now look at the number of pictures in each newspaper and see if they have any relation to the price.
This table shows that the KM Extra has the most pictures per page so that means that it is cheaper to produce pictures than text, and the KM Extra has more information than text because its funding is from its adverts so it would have a lot, and it would have the most picture per page because it has the least pages.
Comparing colour pictures to black and white: -
The amount of colour pictures compared to the black and white means the more black and white there are the smaller the funding the paper has and probable less important newspapers have more black and white ones than colour.
- Text
In this section I am going to look at 1) size of text 2) amount of words on a page 3) an approximant amount of text in the whole paper.
Size of text
The average size of the text in the KM Extra is about point size 8, that is, I think, so they can get more adverts on the page and the same amount of text on but it is just a little bit smaller.
The average size of the text in the Daily Mail is about point size 10 I think that, because they don’t need as many pictures on a page and that as it is bigger it is easier to see the text
The other newspaper, The East Kent Gazette, is roughly the same as the KM Extra.
- Adverts
Adverts are needed in the newspapers for a few reasons, one of then could be for extra funding for the newspaper, and another could be for, just an obvious reason, to advertise local firms.
We can see from the table above that the east Kent gazette has the most adverts per page, I think this, because it is a local paper, all the local traders want their firms and merchandise advertised, so the local people will know about it, there are also a lot of adverts in the local papers because they need adverts and thing like for funding like with the Km Extra it is dependant for the adverts for funding.
- Different sections
In this section I will be looking at how muck space is allocated to the different sections of information.
Like, the sport section is in the back and the weather is usually at the front and so on.
The table above shows that in the more expensive papers would have, usually, a larger quantity of sports pages, and also that they have more pages to fit more in than the local papers.
- Estate Agents
In most newspapers, they have in the middle, a section from the local estate agents, in the KM Extra, There is usually more than the other papers because it is a platform for local traders and estate agents.
The table above shows that, in the free and local papers they have estate agents adverts in them. One reason is because they are local and the estate agents need a cheap and local way of advertising, and the newspapers need funding from wherever they can.
So it can be seen that newspapers are made up of many different items, not just news. As it can be seen in the very first table, the paper that initially appeared the best value for money is not always true. Readers will buy a specific newspaper according to what information they wish to obtain.
