Further more I believe different newspapers show different stories, stories the reader can relate to or stories that inform the reader. I believe personal stories are more often in tabloids where as stories that inform are shown in broadsheets.
The articles are about a seven year old girl called Toni-Ann who has been “deliberately killed” to stop her identifying her fathers murderer. I am going to take the first 100 words from the second paragraph on each article. However when I compare my articles, if there are names given I will not include then in my investigation. For the reason being, that you cannot shorten the length of the name. It is not possible to alternate in this case. I am going to focus on the actual storey then on the way it is reported.
I believe that the media, foremost tabloids, creates the varied emotions and ideas. Often known as the ‘quality press’ being more informing and formal in the manner they put across information and news stories.
I am going to try and avoid bias by producing a random article letter account. To do this, I will choose the middle page in both newspapers, making sure it is the right hand side in both papers, I will still count from the second paragraph excluding certain words for instance, names.
I will initially record my information on a tally chart then throughout my investigation, I will use box and whisker diagrams, pie charts and frequency tables so I can find the mean, medium and the mode.
Furthermore I am going to compare the number of words in a sentence, using the same articles in which I used for the number of letters in an article.
Frequency tables
Broadsheet paper ‘The Daily Telegraph’
Mean = 470/100 = 4.7
Mode = 3
Frequency table
Tabloid paper ‘The Sun’
Mean = 470/100 = 4.7
Mode = 3
Comments on the Frequency tables Broadsheet paper ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and Frequency table Tabloid paper ‘The Sun’
From the frequency tables you can see that ‘The Daily Telegraph’ has 470 letters. ‘The Sun has only 447 words, that is 23 words less than the ‘The Daily Telegraph’. I believe this shows that ‘The Sun’ uses less detailed words for a larger range of audience where ‘The Daily Telegraph’ uses more complex sentences.
The median for the length of words in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ is 6 letters long. However, the median length of words in ‘The Sun is 5, showing that the daily telegraph uses longer more complex words.
I believe where the mode is the identical in both articles, the range of length in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ is greater, where ‘The Sun’ only goes up to 9 letters in a word; ‘The Daily Telegraph’ has words up to 10 letters long. Also the number of letters is more spread out where in ‘The Sun’ the words are focused in the lower letter area, for example 3,5 and 6 letters long.
Frequency tables
Broadsheet paper ‘The Daily Telegraph’
Random search
Mean = 459/100 = 4.59
Mode = 2
Median = 5
Frequency table
Tabloid paper the sun
Random search
Mean = 428/100 = 4.28
Mode = 3
Median = 5
Comments on the Frequency tables Broadsheet paper ‘The Daily Telegraph’ Random search and Frequency table Tabloid paper ‘The Sun’ random search
The total for ‘The Daily Telegraph’ random search is 459. While the total for ‘The Suns’ random search is 428. The difference between them is 31 letters. This proves that ‘The Sun’ uses less detailed and complex words for a longer range of audience. Where as, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ uses complex sentences.
The median for both newspapers is the same, which are 5. I assumed that the median for 'The Daily Telegraph' would be higher than the median for ‘The Sun’. I feel if I tested more words I could of obtained a better result.
The mode for ‘The Sun’ was 3. However, the mode for 'The Daily Telegraph' was 2. This surprised me, as I thought that ‘The Daily Telegraph’ mode would be a higher number like 6 or 7. This could again be down to not testing a large enough quantity of words, for example if I investigated 500 words I would of had more of a possibility to obtain very accurate results, or it could of just been the selection I just picked.
Comments for the frequency polygons for broadsheet paper ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and tabloid paper ‘The sun’
This frequency diagram shows more clearly that the mode is 3 for the tabloid paper ‘The Sun’, as it is the highest point at 23 for the tabloid paper.
Where ‘The Sun’ is more concentrated at lower letters in the words like 3, it then decreases, very low for longer words, like 10 it is at 0.
‘The Daily Telegraph’ is below ‘The Sun’ from 1 to 4 and 6. But it is higher then ‘The Sun’ on 7 and 7-10. This illustrates that ‘The Sun’ uses shorter words so more people can understand them; ‘The Daily Telegraph’ uses longer words for a more complex audience.
