Structure, Purpose & Language of News Articles (U7: P3, M2)
P3 (U7): Describe the structure and purpose for different news articles
M2 (U7): Analyse the linguistic conventions used within different news articles
The Times (Printed Newspaper)
The Sun (Website)
Daily Mail (Snapchat)
Broadsheets, as opposed to tabloid newspapers tend to have more sophisticated and less colloquial language. This is mainly due to the fact that broadsheets tend to be more news centred whilst tabloids tend to focus more on celebrity news. The target audience of broadsheets are people in the A-C1 class grade whilst the target audience of tabloids are people in the C2-E class.
The Times Print Copy
The Times is a broadsheet newspaper meaning that its target audience would most likely be people in the A-C1 social grade. As its printed, the reader of the newspaper in the format would most likely be older members of the public as they would be less likely to use more digital forms of reading the news. This is because young people tend to be more technologically savvy than elders due to their high exposure to technology throughout their lives, therefore making the traditional print for the older readers of The Times. According to a survey carried out by statista in 2018, 6.3 million of The Times' 8.3 million readership belong to the ABC1 social grade with an almost even male-female readership.
Because it's a broadsheet, The Times uses a title with a large word count (compared to tabloid titles) explaining to the reader exactly what the story was without having to use a pun, joke or large picture to take away from the serious situation, being that a Jihadist told an inmate that he wanted to murder a Member of Parliament.
The simplistic writing of The Times is shown to, despite having restricted codes, have writing that reads similarly to advertising copy. This is shown when the article reads "Security sources have said that they had been aware that Amman was a danger to the public when he was freed on January 23 and sent to live in a bail hostel in Streatham."
The opening paragraphs of the article are all single sentences, each of which say only one of the necessary facts before moving on. By ensuring that the reader is getting all of the facts relevant to the story before delving deeper into the news before adding any commentary is mainly done by broadsheets as they would expect higher from their audience than tabloids would. The first paragraph gives the readers some context about who the story is about, his prior crimes and what he threatened to do. The second paragraph goes on to say when the Jihadist was released, how he was killed and by whom. The third paragraph is giving context about a Jihadist's former prison mate before showing the direct quote from said prison mate.
About halfway through the story, the audience is given a quote from a former prisoner who knew the Jihadist (further context was given about the former prisoner before he was quoted). The quote being "he was a volatile and outspoken extremist who once mocked up an Islamic-State style execution on his cellmate." By having a primary source who could provide further information about the story, The Times are continuing to prove the legitimacy of their story. One of the core values of news is accuracy, to which Times is adhering.
Because of the simplicity of the paragraphs (being one sentence a paragraph and two if there's a quote) in the story, the sentence structures are fairly complicated as they each need to give the reader the most amount of information in as little amount of space as possible. This is shown in the sentence "A former prisoner who spent time with Amman in the high security prison told The Times last night that he was a volatile and outspoken extremist who once mocked up an Islamic-State style execution on his cellmate." The sentence gives the reader information about both the extremist and his former prison mate. As most sentences in the story are styled similarly to this, the story has a variety of complex sentence structures.
The Time's mode of address is formal due to it being a broadsheet, and with no added commentary, it is apparent to the reader that the news outlet isn't attempting to push an agenda until all the facts have been written. As it is a broadsheet, The Times mainly used elaborated code when reporting on the story. This is shown when they describe what the former jail mate said about the Jihadist as "he was a volatile and outspoken extremist", but when quoting the jail mate, he said "The guy was definitely insane", a much more colloquial phrase. However, when quoting the inmate, in order to not change his words, The Times used restricted codes due to it being reported speech. In short, in the article, The Times used elaborated codes for the direct speech used and restricted codes for the reported speech used. The use of restricted codes is evident through The Times' quote of the fellow inmate who said "The guy was definitely insane", a sentence that wouldn't have been used by The Times when giving commentary on the story.
As every paragraph revealed more information about the story, The Times did a good job when using the 5Ws and H as they were writing the story because its flow was the same throughout the story. This could be shown in the firs sentence in which The Times said "A terrorist who stabbed two people in a busy shopping street had been released from prison despite telling former inmates that he wanted to murder an MP and intended to do something real". This sentence tells the reader who the story is about, what he did and were he did it before going to into further details.
The Sun Website
Because The Sun is a tabloid newspaper, it would have a target audience of people in the C2- E social grade. As the website branch of The Sun in digital, the users of the The Sun Website would most likely be 18-40 year olds in the quoted social grade. Because of younger people being more exposed to the internet through their computers, phones and tablets, The Sun's website would be used more by their young-middle aged users instead of their 50+ target audience. Because the news outlet caters to the male gaze theory with its large amounts of young women on its front pages and the infamous page 3 article, The Sun has a mainly male target audience. However, this divide in male to female readership isn't as big as one would think as a survey carried out in 2014 concluded that The Sun's readers have a divide of 55-45% (55% being male). The gender of the target demographic would most likely not change dependant on the outlet of the newspaper as it would most likely only affect the age of the reader and not their gender.
The Sun's website heavily relies on its headlines to have puns with very little information about the story they're publishing. By having the pun at the beginning of the headline, with little explanation on how it makes sense afterwards, readers are inclined to read the full article as they would most likely want even more information. This is shown through the title "Shoot For Brains" in which a colloquial term is played on with the word "shoot", urging the reader to want to find out what it has to do with the image of David Cameron above.
The purpose of the article was to inform the public of an incident involving a gun and Britain's ex-prime minister, but more importantly to put David Cameron in a negative light. This is evident through the information that had nothing to do with the story. Added at the end, the article was saying "One of David Cameron's police bodyguards has been suspended pending an investigation" suggesting that this wasn't a sole incident involving the ex- Prime Minister.
The article's headline reads similarly to a stand, partially due to the moral panic caused be the phrasing chosen by The Sun. Because of the news outlet's large use of colloquial terms such as "ex-PM" and "loo", viewers of the headline are inclined to read due to it reading similarly to the way they speak. It sparks panic due to capitalised words such as "gun" and "chaos", both of which were used to advertise the article to the reader. All of this accompanied with the alliterated "Cam Cop Chaos" prove that The Sun are trying to establish a restricted code amongst their C2DE audience.
The lack of commas in the article's compound sentences show that The Sun want their article to be read as advertising copy. This is shown in the quote shown on the left "Tracking apps show the Heathrow-bound plane left New York 67 minutes late on Monday evening. It landed just after 7am yesterday."
As well as the unnecessarily added information, it would make sense for The Sun, a traditionally right wing paper with an audience of people in the C2-E classes to go after David Cameron, an ex-politician of whom a large stake of The Conservatives have a negative opinion.
The structure of the story is mainly compiled of quotes from eye-witnesses of the event, which were often broken up into paragraphs as each point relevant to the story was made. This order was shown in the quote “The captain confirmed a gun had been found- which freaked everyone out,” which was later backed up by quotes of the same nature by other eye witness accounts.
Towards the end of the story, there were also official quotes from the Metropolitan Police regarding the incident with very little commentary from The Sun. This is shown through the quote “The officer involved has been removed from operational duties. We are taking this matter extremely seriously and an internal investigation is taking place.” which appeared to give further context to the story.
The mode of address used was mainly informal (most likely due to it being a tabloid) which is demonstrated from their reluctance to call David Cameron by his ex official title and to instead call him the ex-PM, further demonstrating their ulterior motive to show him in a negative light.
As paragraphs were made up of one or two short sentences, the paragraphing of the article was made to be easily digestible for its readers and to not overwhelm them with facts or quotes on the story.
Overall, the structure and purpose of the story was to inform the readers about an incident involving Britain's ex leader and to show him in a negative fashion. As the reported speech was an official statement by the Metropolitan police and because the news outlet only used elaborated codes when writing direct speech, little to no restricted codes were in the article, apart from the eye witness accounts from the citizens on the plane.
The Sun did a good job reporting on the story's 5Ws and H as more information about the story and its events unfolded the more it was written. This is evident from the beginning of the story which said "David Cameron’s police bodyguard sparked panic on a BA jumbo jet when he left his loaded Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol in the loo." which tells the reader what happened, how it happened and where it happened. The Sun furthered this by giving additional information later in the story.
The Daily Mail heavily relies on the male gaze theory to publish this article on Snapchat. Despite, on paper, having very little to do with their British audience, who in general don't care much for the NFL, because Snapchat has a large audience of teenagers who want to look at influencers that show large amounts of exposed skin.
Despite having little to nothing to do with the article, The Daily Mail decided to include Instagram photos of an Instagram model who streaked the Super Bowl in an attempt to attract readers.
This, accompanied with the pun headline is not abnormal for tabloids like The Daily Mail who usually rely on easy to read articles about celebrities to attract readers.
The story reads similarly to other tabloids, despite being classified as a middle-market paper. However because there were fewer people to interview, there was a smaller stress on quotes for the article, and a higher dependency on pictures of the incident through out the article, including pictures from the Instagram model's social media with information about her in between said pictures.
The mode of address was informal due to the lack of advanced language to describe the story and, instead, simple sentenced paragraphs describing the events that took place with very little commentary at the end, being that the Instagram model only did the stunt in attempt to increase her number of Instagram followers, this being evident from their inclusion of her Instagram pictures, her captions on posts she's made and repeatedly saying the number of followers she currently has.
The complex sentences in Daily Mail's article is shown to written similarly to that of advertising copy. This is mainly due to the lack of commas included which is shown in the quote "the scantily clad woman who was tackled by security after running onto the field during the Super Bowl has been pictured leaving jail following a night in the cells". The simplistic writing style is further proven by the news outlet's use of colloquial language which is evident through phrases such as "the cells".
The Daily Mail did a good job answering the 5Ws and 1H despite some of them obviously being pointed out from the nature of the story (as the NFL wouldn't want to disclose how the model got past security and ran onto the field). However, despite being successful in answering the criteria, The Daily Mail didn't feel the need to write their story with a large amount of wording. Because of its short length, The Daily Mail compensated by scattering a large amount of pictures and videos loosely related to the story (such as pictures from the model's Instagram) to make it seem that it was longer than it actually was.
As The Daily Mail quoted the Instagram model's captions on her Instagram posts, a large number of restricted codes were used when writing direct speech, all of which is evident when The Daily Mail quoted her saying on her Instagram "Young jail bait out of jail. Fresh out of pen" a quote that would have never been made by The Daily Mail when adding commentary to the story. This can be shown in the screenshot to the left.
However, despite The Daily Mail being a tabloid magazine, there were uses of elaborate codes when writing direct speech.
M2 (U7): Analyse the linguistic conventions used within different news articles
The Times (Printed Newspaper)
The Sun (Website)
Daily Mail (Snapchat)
Broadsheets, as opposed to tabloid newspapers tend to have more sophisticated and less colloquial language. This is mainly due to the fact that broadsheets tend to be more news centred whilst tabloids tend to focus more on celebrity news. The target audience of broadsheets are people in the A-C1 class grade whilst the target audience of tabloids are people in the C2-E class.
The Times Print Copy
The Times is a broadsheet newspaper meaning that its target audience would most likely be people in the A-C1 social grade. As its printed, the reader of the newspaper in the format would most likely be older members of the public as they would be less likely to use more digital forms of reading the news. This is because young people tend to be more technologically savvy than elders due to their high exposure to technology throughout their lives, therefore making the traditional print for the older readers of The Times. According to a survey carried out by statista in 2018, 6.3 million of The Times' 8.3 million readership belong to the ABC1 social grade with an almost even male-female readership.
Because it's a broadsheet, The Times uses a title with a large word count (compared to tabloid titles) explaining to the reader exactly what the story was without having to use a pun, joke or large picture to take away from the serious situation, being that a Jihadist told an inmate that he wanted to murder a Member of Parliament.
The simplistic writing of The Times is shown to, despite having restricted codes, have writing that reads similarly to advertising copy. This is shown when the article reads "Security sources have said that they had been aware that Amman was a danger to the public when he was freed on January 23 and sent to live in a bail hostel in Streatham."
The opening paragraphs of the article are all single sentences, each of which say only one of the necessary facts before moving on. By ensuring that the reader is getting all of the facts relevant to the story before delving deeper into the news before adding any commentary is mainly done by broadsheets as they would expect higher from their audience than tabloids would. The first paragraph gives the readers some context about who the story is about, his prior crimes and what he threatened to do. The second paragraph goes on to say when the Jihadist was released, how he was killed and by whom. The third paragraph is giving context about a Jihadist's former prison mate before showing the direct quote from said prison mate.
About halfway through the story, the audience is given a quote from a former prisoner who knew the Jihadist (further context was given about the former prisoner before he was quoted). The quote being "he was a volatile and outspoken extremist who once mocked up an Islamic-State style execution on his cellmate." By having a primary source who could provide further information about the story, The Times are continuing to prove the legitimacy of their story. One of the core values of news is accuracy, to which Times is adhering.
Because of the simplicity of the paragraphs (being one sentence a paragraph and two if there's a quote) in the story, the sentence structures are fairly complicated as they each need to give the reader the most amount of information in as little amount of space as possible. This is shown in the sentence "A former prisoner who spent time with Amman in the high security prison told The Times last night that he was a volatile and outspoken extremist who once mocked up an Islamic-State style execution on his cellmate." The sentence gives the reader information about both the extremist and his former prison mate. As most sentences in the story are styled similarly to this, the story has a variety of complex sentence structures.
The Time's mode of address is formal due to it being a broadsheet, and with no added commentary, it is apparent to the reader that the news outlet isn't attempting to push an agenda until all the facts have been written. As it is a broadsheet, The Times mainly used elaborated code when reporting on the story. This is shown when they describe what the former jail mate said about the Jihadist as "he was a volatile and outspoken extremist", but when quoting the jail mate, he said "The guy was definitely insane", a much more colloquial phrase. However, when quoting the inmate, in order to not change his words, The Times used restricted codes due to it being reported speech. In short, in the article, The Times used elaborated codes for the direct speech used and restricted codes for the reported speech used. The use of restricted codes is evident through The Times' quote of the fellow inmate who said "The guy was definitely insane", a sentence that wouldn't have been used by The Times when giving commentary on the story.
As every paragraph revealed more information about the story, The Times did a good job when using the 5Ws and H as they were writing the story because its flow was the same throughout the story. This could be shown in the firs sentence in which The Times said "A terrorist who stabbed two people in a busy shopping street had been released from prison despite telling former inmates that he wanted to murder an MP and intended to do something real". This sentence tells the reader who the story is about, what he did and were he did it before going to into further details.
The Sun Website
Because The Sun is a tabloid newspaper, it would have a target audience of people in the C2- E social grade. As the website branch of The Sun in digital, the users of the The Sun Website would most likely be 18-40 year olds in the quoted social grade. Because of younger people being more exposed to the internet through their computers, phones and tablets, The Sun's website would be used more by their young-middle aged users instead of their 50+ target audience. Because the news outlet caters to the male gaze theory with its large amounts of young women on its front pages and the infamous page 3 article, The Sun has a mainly male target audience. However, this divide in male to female readership isn't as big as one would think as a survey carried out in 2014 concluded that The Sun's readers have a divide of 55-45% (55% being male). The gender of the target demographic would most likely not change dependant on the outlet of the newspaper as it would most likely only affect the age of the reader and not their gender.
The Sun's website heavily relies on its headlines to have puns with very little information about the story they're publishing. By having the pun at the beginning of the headline, with little explanation on how it makes sense afterwards, readers are inclined to read the full article as they would most likely want even more information. This is shown through the title "Shoot For Brains" in which a colloquial term is played on with the word "shoot", urging the reader to want to find out what it has to do with the image of David Cameron above.The purpose of the article was to inform the public of an incident involving a gun and Britain's ex-prime minister, but more importantly to put David Cameron in a negative light. This is evident through the information that had nothing to do with the story. Added at the end, the article was saying "One of David Cameron's police bodyguards has been suspended pending an investigation" suggesting that this wasn't a sole incident involving the ex- Prime Minister.
The article's headline reads similarly to a stand, partially due to the moral panic caused be the phrasing chosen by The Sun. Because of the news outlet's large use of colloquial terms such as "ex-PM" and "loo", viewers of the headline are inclined to read due to it reading similarly to the way they speak. It sparks panic due to capitalised words such as "gun" and "chaos", both of which were used to advertise the article to the reader. All of this accompanied with the alliterated "Cam Cop Chaos" prove that The Sun are trying to establish a restricted code amongst their C2DE audience.
As well as the unnecessarily added information, it would make sense for The Sun, a traditionally right wing paper with an audience of people in the C2-E classes to go after David Cameron, an ex-politician of whom a large stake of The Conservatives have a negative opinion.
The structure of the story is mainly compiled of quotes from eye-witnesses of the event, which were often broken up into paragraphs as each point relevant to the story was made. This order was shown in the quote “The captain confirmed a gun had been found- which freaked everyone out,” which was later backed up by quotes of the same nature by other eye witness accounts.
Towards the end of the story, there were also official quotes from the Metropolitan Police regarding the incident with very little commentary from The Sun. This is shown through the quote “The officer involved has been removed from operational duties. We are taking this matter extremely seriously and an internal investigation is taking place.” which appeared to give further context to the story.
The mode of address used was mainly informal (most likely due to it being a tabloid) which is demonstrated from their reluctance to call David Cameron by his ex official title and to instead call him the ex-PM, further demonstrating their ulterior motive to show him in a negative light.
As paragraphs were made up of one or two short sentences, the paragraphing of the article was made to be easily digestible for its readers and to not overwhelm them with facts or quotes on the story.
Overall, the structure and purpose of the story was to inform the readers about an incident involving Britain's ex leader and to show him in a negative fashion. As the reported speech was an official statement by the Metropolitan police and because the news outlet only used elaborated codes when writing direct speech, little to no restricted codes were in the article, apart from the eye witness accounts from the citizens on the plane.
The Sun did a good job reporting on the story's 5Ws and H as more information about the story and its events unfolded the more it was written. This is evident from the beginning of the story which said "David Cameron’s police bodyguard sparked panic on a BA jumbo jet when he left his loaded Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol in the loo." which tells the reader what happened, how it happened and where it happened. The Sun furthered this by giving additional information later in the story.
Daily Mail Snapchat
The Daily Mail is a tabloid news source meaning that the social grade of its target audience would be C2-E. As the news story is on Snapchat, a social media, the readers of the story would most likely be the news source's youngest readers being 13-25 year olds. As Daily Mail wanted to have a bigger presence amongst young readers, they targeted the demographic by making their news articles available for consumption on a platform heavily used by the target audience rather making the users of this branch of The Daily Mail the news outlet's youngest readers. However, a survey in 2014 concluded that the 52-55% majority of Daily Mail's readers were female with the news outlet's average age being 58. Daily Mail most likely decided to release their news articles on social media and adhere to the male gaze theory to reach other markets.
The Daily Mail heavily relies on the male gaze theory to publish this article on Snapchat. Despite, on paper, having very little to do with their British audience, who in general don't care much for the NFL, because Snapchat has a large audience of teenagers who want to look at influencers that show large amounts of exposed skin.Despite having little to nothing to do with the article, The Daily Mail decided to include Instagram photos of an Instagram model who streaked the Super Bowl in an attempt to attract readers.
This, accompanied with the pun headline is not abnormal for tabloids like The Daily Mail who usually rely on easy to read articles about celebrities to attract readers.
The story reads similarly to other tabloids, despite being classified as a middle-market paper. However because there were fewer people to interview, there was a smaller stress on quotes for the article, and a higher dependency on pictures of the incident through out the article, including pictures from the Instagram model's social media with information about her in between said pictures.
The mode of address was informal due to the lack of advanced language to describe the story and, instead, simple sentenced paragraphs describing the events that took place with very little commentary at the end, being that the Instagram model only did the stunt in attempt to increase her number of Instagram followers, this being evident from their inclusion of her Instagram pictures, her captions on posts she's made and repeatedly saying the number of followers she currently has.The complex sentences in Daily Mail's article is shown to written similarly to that of advertising copy. This is mainly due to the lack of commas included which is shown in the quote "the scantily clad woman who was tackled by security after running onto the field during the Super Bowl has been pictured leaving jail following a night in the cells". The simplistic writing style is further proven by the news outlet's use of colloquial language which is evident through phrases such as "the cells".
The Daily Mail did a good job answering the 5Ws and 1H despite some of them obviously being pointed out from the nature of the story (as the NFL wouldn't want to disclose how the model got past security and ran onto the field). However, despite being successful in answering the criteria, The Daily Mail didn't feel the need to write their story with a large amount of wording. Because of its short length, The Daily Mail compensated by scattering a large amount of pictures and videos loosely related to the story (such as pictures from the model's Instagram) to make it seem that it was longer than it actually was.
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| Screenshot depicting the quote from the model's Instagram. Also shows the high picture to word ratio. |
However, despite The Daily Mail being a tabloid magazine, there were uses of elaborate codes when writing direct speech.
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