The second session of Introduction to Journalism was more of a follow up to the previous weeks lesson and discussing the headlines and news agenda of the papers and how they relate to the current events. When discussing the differences between how the papers operate and to what demographic they appeal, we took the first example of The Independent, and how it has a very close circulation around the A, B, C1 classes, but suffers from competition with other, better funded papers with a larger amount of advertising space even though "important" people (i.e. people in power and are wealthy) pretty much get them delivered to them everyday.
The angle that The Independent was taking on the Government budget cuts was "policy", with the headline of "Fasten your seat belts, Britain." The Independent sees its audience as wannabe leaders of the world, who will likely have a higher class opinion on a lot of things, mostly revolving around the way the country is being run. It also prides itself on being a "Murdoch-free" zone, which can't be said for other such papers.
The Times sees itself as the "journal of record" in the sense that they record the really important information from history. So, say for example, historians were to look back over history for a record of events passed, The Times would be thought of as a record of information about the important stages of history. and example of this is the story that ran in today's Times about the newly discovered galaxy, which also appeared in only a small amount of other papers today. The Times may be a Murdoch-run paper, but it starts to go downhill someway into reading it and starts to appeal to a more Daily Mail oriented audience with its advert content. It should be mentioned at this point that you can normally assume any papers audience class by seeing what kind of cars are advertised in the paper, as cars are normally (if, somewhat stereotypically) an indicator of what a persons income is and therefore what class category they fall into.
"Screamers" (exclamation points) should only be used when headlines are joking or being sarcastic in some sense, and not being used to jump off the page, as was displayed in today's The Sun.
The Today Show on Radio 4 was also discussed, and the reason behind why they lead into the football news at exactly 8:20 (10 minutes after they start the show). It is apparently believed that this is the point at which anyone of any importance who might be listening (i.e. The Queen herself) would go to the bathroom, and so this is the time they put on the football news. The Today Show tends to have an appeal towards a higher class of people, but they are more likely to take the rip out of most subjects they talk about.
It has been widely speculated that the best written paper currently on the market is The Telegraph, even though most of its stories tend to revolve more around crime stories rather than general news from around the world, or current budget climates.
We then moved on to talk about WINOL, or Winchester News Online, which we will be working on more in the second semester of the course. We viewed some news stories that were online on the site and discussed how they were reported differently from normal news in order to appeal more to a strictly student audience base. The news stories that were reported on were very concise, direct and to the point in their appeal to students and how the news stories would affect them, which is good because this clearly shows how they are appealing to their main demographic.
Television tends to be a good retail of the news, but not as a wholesale form of getting information in the way that papers can deliver, as they give a more widespread view of the information which is entirely un-condensed.
Finally we discussed how punctuation and grammar are a huge deal in the journalism industry, as one simple mistake can set you behind when people send letters and e-mails to you pointing out the spelling mistakes and you have to reply to each of them before moving on with any news. So there can be huge ramifications for small mistakes if you are not very careful!
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