This report is about the comparison of two newspapers between Tabloid and Broadsheet for the college assignment. The report is due to be submitted to the lecturer Mark Blackmore by Friday 14th January 2005.
- Procedure
In order to carry out a comprehensive investigation of two papers, the Daily Mirror was chosen as a Tabloid and The Guardian was chosen as a Broadsheet. Both of them were bought on the same day, Tuesday 21st December 2004.
- Findings
3.1 Contents
- Content of Tabloid
The Daily Mirror spends 12 pages at the end on sport news, about 3 pages on cricket, 6 pages on football, 2 pages on sports TV showing a timetable of all games’ results, and the rest of the page on Sports Wire. Page 2 is the only one page to write about a politician. Page 44 is also only page to give information about business, it is called “Your Money”, the share stock table only takes less than a quarter of this page. But the show business counts for 15 pages in this whole Tabloid. There are 3 pages giving all the TV shows guide and the Christmas offers advertising for mobile phones, food, clothing, computers and cars in another 10 pages in the Tabloid. It also provides 8 pages on “Your Life”, a special edition programme about fashion, beauty, relationship, celebrity style and shopping, in the middle of all pages in today’s Daily Mirror. Another 2 pages tell the brief news in the UK, half a page on weather forecast, 1 page on games and puzzles.
- Content of Broadsheet
The Guardian takes 6 pages on sport reporting, there are 2 pages on cricket, one page on football, racing and games timetables each share one in 1 page, the sport results are only arranged in a small part in one of the pages. Only one puzzle game is found in the corner of the last page. The Broadsheet also use 2 pages on Comment and Analysis, 3 pages on business, 2 pages on international news, 5 pages on national news, half a page on policy and politics, 3 pages on general news from front pages. In the “G2” pages, the first 6 front pages are all long articles. The 2 following pages on health articles, another one for law, and 4 pages on art. Job advertisings take 6 pages in today’s “G2”. Information on theater, cinema, radio, and TV shows, is on the last 6 pages.
- Comparing both
To compare the contents of Tabloid and Broadsheet, they all provide plenty of reading for the readers. The Daily Mirror has more content pages than The Guardian, and also it gives readers many more stories about show business than The Guardian. But the Daily Mirror has no pages at all on job advertisings. The Guardian spent more pages on proper nationwide news than the Daily Mirror, and has more long articles of editorial analysis. Neither of them has got a part about properties.
3.2 Use of images
3.2.1 Use of images in Tabloid
There are images on all pages in the Daily Mirror. There are 23 pages with colour pictures, the rest are black and white. All show business pages use colourful images to fill in, like colour photos of Robbie Williams, Denise, Natasha Bedingfield. They also use a certain number of photos on people’s stories or accidents, most pages have adverts.
3.2.2 Use of images in Broadsheet
A lot of pictures are put in every single page in The Guardian. Most of the big images are arranged in the middle of pages, or in the middle of articles. There are 5 pages of colourful pictures are in the art shows, part in “G2”, another 10 pictures within advertisings, but no images at all in the job searching pages.
3.2.3 Comparing both
Both of these two papers use many interesting images in most of the content pages, and good quality pictures are put in. But it is easy to see that Tabloid has more images than the Broadsheet, they use many more people’s photos in the people’s stories than in a Broadsheet. However, The Guardian has more valuable photos, which are not as easy to find as in a Tabloid.
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Language
3.3.1 Language of Tabloid
The language of Daily Mirror is very informal, brief sentences and brief words are put in each story. Most of stories are very short, they even use a lot of slang words in some of the reports. Sometimes there are spelling or grammar mistakes in the report.
3.3.2 Language of Broadsheet
Completely formal English writing is used in Broadsheets; many long articles are very detailed, also they use the proper words and complete sentences to report most of news, certainly, it is hard to find any spelling or grammar mistakes in the articles. A person, who has quite high education, who is a professional writer, or works in an academic institution, or a government speaker, are writer many of writings from Broadsheet.
3.3.3 Comparing both
The languages of used in these two papers is completely different. The language in the Tabloid is less formal than that in the Broadsheet, with easy words and short sentences making it very easy for readers to understand, for example, the first sentence under the head “GR-eight balls of fire” is like “Bionic boyo Simon Jones will never forget the day he fired England to the brink of a record-breaking eighth consecutive Test win.” But for the a similar story in the Broadsheet, comes under the headline “Jones the dragon of St George’s” and: “Whenever he has escaped the physic’s room, Simon Jones has made things happen. Yesterday he played the role of catalyst to perfection.”
- Conclusions
In general, based on the above investigation of a Tabloid and a Broadsheet, Tabloid can give more day-to-day things to attract the reader who wants a relaxing reading, consequently, a Broadsheet can provide more useful society information to sell to the reader who is looking for proper news or information for a academic research.