The two papers I shall be using to do my project are:
The Daily Telegraph (Broadsheet Newspaper)
The Daily Sport (Tabloid Newspaper).
This should show a contrast of results, and if my prediction is correct, then we shall see that the tabloid is the favourite with fewer words and more pictures.
Data Collection
In order to complete my data collection, I had to choose a number of articles or else the numbers would have not been sufficient to produce the data required.
Here are the tables I produced for my first piece:
This table was from my first article, and it was from my Tabloid newspaper called the Daily Sport.
It was the amount of words per sentence in an article concerning David Beckham.
As you can see, the length of words per sentence are not long. This is also shown in the graph below:
The second article that I had completed was from the same paper. The article I chose was to do with cricket, and here was how the table turned out which is then followed by a graph.
The numbers that came from this article were similar to the previous, as they were from the sport article. When I then chose another article these were the results that I had received.
This next article I portrayed in a different manner. I used a pie chart to show how different it would be if I chose an ordinary article instead of a sporting article.
It still shows that the tabloid newspaper had a lack of words per sentence, and will later show that it should have more pictures if my prediction is correct. This article was of the murder of a soap star, and included longer sentences than that of a sporting article.
Out of the three articles that I have investigated, I have seen that the most commonly number of words tended to be between 11 > 20. This should then be common in most tabloid newspapers as they all have the same concept to their newspapers.
The next table that I produced was also from the same paper, but it was from the political end of the Daily Star. Here is what the results showed from this section:
The graph shows that there were more words per sentence in this article in comparison to the other articles. This is shown in the sentence lengths between 11 < 25.
This shows that tabloid newspapers use fewer words per sentence to illustrate their use of pictures which will be shown at a later stage.
The next newspaper I shall be using is called The Daily Telegraph. It is known as a broadsheet newspaper, and the results will contrast to those of the tabloid newspaper.
The information I gathered varied in the mount of articles, as the articles were generally bigger.
Here is my first set of results:
The information is gathered from an article also concerning David Beckam, but it is from another newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. As you can see that the tabloid newspaper uses more sentences
My next article was concerning the British Number 1 seeded tennis player, Tim Henman.
It was to do with a charity games played, and here are the results that came out this article.
As the graph shows, this is a typical example of a broadsheet newspaper. Many of the words per sentence are to the end of the graph, which means there are more per sentence than a tabloid newspaper.
The next article was done from the sports section of this paper. It was to do with cricket, as I did in the other newspaper. Here are the result and a table to show how the results were produced.
Here is the graph to simply these results:
As the graph shows, this graph contrasts to the rest of the results formed by the same newspaper. Most of the numbers produced are at the front of the graph, meaning that there were fewer words per sentence. This is odd as a broadsheet newspaper normally contains many words per sentence.
My next task was to compare the number of pictures per page, over a period of 8 pages per paper.
At first, I gathered the information from the Daily Sport..
Here is my first set of results:
The numbers of pictures on this page were what we would expect from a tabloid newspaper.
As this graph shows, the amounts of pictures per page were in great contrast to that of the broadsheet newspaper. Pictures averaged around 6 – 10 a page, which is a lot considering the amount from a broadsheet.
Interpret and Discuss
The patterns that were produced from these graphs and tables were as I predicted. They were correct to the way I interpreted them, as I said that a broadsheet would contain more words per sentence, than a tabloid newspaper would. A tabloid newspaper would contain more pictures than a broadsheet newspaper.
The graphs that came out of the results were predictable. It showed that generally, there were more words per sentence and fewer pictures on a page.
My original aim was to find out which newspaper contained the most words per sentence, and the newspaper that contained the most pictures per page.
Now that I have found out which one does which, I am not surprised as it is the exact results I predicted at the beginning of this experiment.
The only way I was able to stop this coursework from being biass was to use similar articles in both papers. I chose articles that had the same name, heading, or generally where about the same topic. If I had chosen random topics, then my results would have been random, and they would not have followed the pattern that I had expected.