Their readership, unlike broadsheet newspapers, is generally the working class public.
The “Daily Mail” and “The Express” are both called the middle market, they sell over 3 million copies a day, and contain a balance of news, photographs and features. The five qualities (or main broadsheets) are the “Daily Telegraph” the “Times,” “The Gardian”, “The Independent” and “The Financial Times”. In these papers there is a lot more news covering political foreign issues, which tabloids sometimes neglect. These newspapers have a more “high brow” readership. The Broadsheets aren’t as popular as the tabloids, but all-in-all news papers are still a crucial way of obtaining the news.
September the 11th is synonymous with terror, destruction, death, despair, hatred and pain - but also with courage, determination, freedom and love. The first anniversary of September 11th provided the Broadsheets and Tabloids with a golden opportunity to focus on the human interest aspects of the tragedy. The news value of September 11th is unquantifiable, as it marks that day never to be forgotten in history.
So every newspaper will be competing for the readership on this day, as it strikes a close relationships with the reader which would have affected them in one-way or another. The headline for The Independent is simply “September 11” in big, bold, clear, black font. This headline is simplistic - yet in the readers mind it conjures up a personal response of what was happening this time last year.
The journalist avoids use of puns, alliteration and emotive techniques - but it still highly effective. The headline for the Daily Mail is “WHERE THE HELL IS HE NOW?” With a subtitle: “Armageddon a year on. But as the west prepares for war, the question remains...........”. This headline is much bigger in font size than the Independent’s and is underlined. It is also in big, bold capital letters, which is extremely eye catching and uses a rhetorical question to personalise it to the reader. It also uses sensationalism as the west aren’t actually preparing for war - it’s there to grab your attention. The headline is in white font on top of a black background which makes it somehow gloomy, on the other hand the picture for the Independent is of the New York skyline a year after the terrorist attacks. It is directly under the headline and the skyline is beautiful, clear and calm yet - without the two magnificent twin towers. This picture is highly emotive, and by far the most effective of the two pictures, as it is such a contrast of the skyline a year ago as the dominant familiar feature is missing, the sky is also ‘impossibly blue’ making you wonder will history tragically repeat itself a year on.
The Daily Mail’s picture is a large, close up picture of Osma Bin Laden, the man behind the terrorists attacks. This picture dominates the whole front page and links up with the headline. Both the Mail and the Independent have avoided showing pictures of the plane flying into the towers, and have instead gone with a more emotive approach of making the reader conjure up those images. The photograph of the skyline in the Independent is in full colour and is dislocated from the masthead.
In the Mail the front page is given to the picture and the choice of colours are red, black and white, which are all very bold colours and stand out well. As the whole front page is given to the picture in the Mail it has no room for a article - unlike the Independent. The article begins with the five “Ws” (who, what, where, why and when) which are used in journalism in order to quickly inform a reader of the ‘gist’ of the article and to gain interest.
“When four hijacked aircraft swept from an impossibly blue sky to kill 3,000 people and transform America today.” This statement contains descriptive writing - enticing the reader. Like most broadsheets newspaper newspapers, the facts and opinions provided in the Independent are very much impartial. It contains mostly facts with very little opinion, and provides ‘the story’, with the only opinions contained in quotes used in this article, nothing is ‘left out’ as to influence the readers opinion on the story. As a result, it is less sensational and more factual.
The Independent, being a broadsheet, has very little emotive language exploited by its journalists, and is almost a neutral source of information, like wise The Mail has no by-line, as it has no article, caption, advert, columns, index or blurb, whilst the independent has all of these things- but you must take into consideration the size difference between a broadsheet and a tabloid.
The broadsheet still gives the majority of the front page to the lead story, although it can still afford to have a support story about “Parliament to be recalled after Blair bows to pressure for debate”, because of its sheer size. The overall layout of the Independent article is simplistic, the print size is small, but normal for newspapers and even the headline uses a relatively small font. It is set out in columns and isn’t as eye catching and the Mail’s huge headline and picture.
It is obvious, from comparison of the two newspapers and the different way in which they deliver the news, that the Mail and the Independent are ‘worlds apart’. As the tabloid newspapers are selling millions more copies than the broadsheets I wonder - do people, on the whole, want facts and figures that the broadsheets provide, or do they want gossip, opinion and bias? Do they want to be shocked and entertained, which is what the tabloids aim to do. I think the answer to that question is to be found in the sales figures.
