Comparing Newspaper Reports of the Drowning of Two School Students in October 2000

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Comparing Newspaper Reports of the Drowning of Two School Students in October 2000

I have been studying newspaper reports about two year 9 girls drowned

on a school trip while taking part in a river walking activity. Only

one body was found at the time when the articles were published.

Newspapers aspire to interest and inform the readers of current

topics. Tabloids tend to glorify or emotionalise their articles to

gain more interest with their audience. Examples of tabloid newspapers

are ‘The Sun’, ‘The Mirror’ and ‘The Star’. The other type of

newspaper is Broadsheet such as ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Times’ and ‘The

Daily Telegraph’. Broadsheets tend to be more formal and proper in the

way they set out there reports.

I am going to compare this article from four types of newspaper, two

from the tabloid and two from the broadsheet. The articles are from

‘The Sun’ and the ‘Daily Mail’ as the tabloids and ‘The Independent

and the ‘Daily Telegraph’ as the broadsheets. I am going to convey the

different techniques that tabloids and broadsheets use in reports.

Both newspapers have different ways of setting out there images. ‘The

Sun’ has used three e-fit pictures which take up half the right side

of the page. The main picture shows the river where the incident

happened. It is noticeable that it is very dangerous because the

picture has large dimensions; this will catch the reader’s eye. The

other two e-fit pictures show the school student involved and the head

teacher of the school. This tells us that tabloids focus strongly on

images to win interest with their readers. The headline is also in a

very large font on a black background, which again catches the eye of

the reader. The headline says ‘What were the teachers doing?’.

In contrast to ‘The Sun’, ‘The Independent and ‘Daily Telegraph both

have smaller e-fit pictures which are much smaller in scale compared

to the tabloid report. The headlines are also smaller in font; they

say ‘School is stunned by field trip tragedy and ‘Second girl is still

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