Tabloid and Broadsheet Article Comparison

Tabloid and Broadsheet Article Comparison

Tabloid and Broadsheet Article Comparison

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to write a detailed comparison based on the ways of how different newspapers present their data in order to attract custom. I will be looking closely at the presentation, content and style of a tabloid newspaper (The Sun) and a broadsheet newspaper (The Times). To enable this assessment to be fair, I will be concentrating on a particular event, which happened back in 1986.

Analysis

The article in which I will be focusing on is about an Arab man (Nezar Hindawi) who tried to dupe his pregnant girlfriend. The Arab had planted an explosive in the luggage belonging to his intended wife and sent her as a human time bomb to board a jet containing more than four hundred unsuspecting passengers and crew. Newspaper articles always consists of a subject heading; to attract a reader to a story, subheadings; to guide the reader through the story, and paragraph sections which contain necessary details appropriate for the clarification of the story for the reader it targets. The language and visual appearance are the key factors to the contents of a newspaper, and the editors pride themselves on a politically correct informative style of journalism, suitable for the newspaper they are promoting.

The visual appearance is a very important aspect of both a tabloid and a broadsheet newspaper layout, as it has to capture the public's eye. If it fails to do this, there will be a decline in public interests and sales would decrease through loss of custom. The standards of the newspaper should be of the same quality each time it comes off the press, otherwise the public turn towards other companies. The consistency of this standard is vital to the consumer who expects a particular style. Newspaper companies often run the beginning of the story on the front page and continue it on a later page. The importance of the story is usually included in the information given on the front page. The story about the human time bomb hit the front pages of the Sun and The Times. The two companies displayed the story in extremely different ways. The Sun used most of the space on the front page for this article. The size of a tabloid newspaper is suitable to fit into small places, and it does not create the problem of folding over when being read, like a broadsheet does.

The only other information featured on the page was an advertisement for the Sam Frocks Collection and another for the £50,000 Bingo prize for that day's winner. The journalists managed to fill it with a big, bold 'WANTED' sign stretching from one side of the page to the other as well as a quarter page black and white picture of the Arab, and a twenty-one worded headline placed just above the tiny amount of text that was squashed into the bottom ...