Tuesday 6 December 2016

Uses and Gratifications 

Uses and gratifications theory is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience-centered 
approach to understanding mass communication. ... It assumes that audience members are not passive consumers of media.

An example of this could be when someone buys themselves an apple I phone it comes very bare and you have the choice to put what you want on it from the app store.

Also when we have the choice to choose what channel we want to watch on a tv remote. 

Tuesday 8 November 2016

First part of Task 1 Times and Sun Newspaper Task


The news I will be comparing from the two different newspapers is the US election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. To start I will find a similar point that I found after analyzing the sources, both the sun and the times have negative Headlines, firstly the Times use, "FBI TO HUNT FOR SECRETS ON SEX PESTS COMPUTER". This referring to Donald trump and the allegations made against him by numerous women. And the sun uses "RUMP VS TRUMP". This being a lot easier to read than a sentence compared to the Times. Ultimately this may have been decided before the page was edited for the Sun to have a small headline as most headlines are small and rather snappy. On the other hand the Times is a lot more formal in its approach.

The Sun and the Times use different approaches to grab the readers attention, The sun uses a shot of famous singer Jennifer Lopez as she performed at Hillary's Rally. However, the image used isn't just of Hillary and Jennifer talking or hugging, its a rather racy image of her from behind. This is strange because you certainly wouldn't expect to be seeing something like this in an article on politics. This may however indicate what the Sun thinks its viewers will grab there attention to when flicking through what some may seem as boring or not very important considering its not actually British Politics. The times uses a double page spread of Hillary talking closely to someone who works for her. This image even though it may look very normal and not quite as eye catching as the other one may just be as effective. I believe this because using an image of someone like Hillary Clinton who at the time of this paper being released is one of the most recognizable people in the world. This helps people gravitate toward the article because as soon as the see an image of her they will assume its about the election, or even something else that may be of interest such as the scandals she has been in or the FBI probe against her.
The times use a full 2 pages to talk about the US General election unlike the Sun which only uses a measly half a page.

I feel that after the analyzing that I have done on both the times and the sun that it is clear the two papers are targeted towards not just a different age group but a different social class as well. I believe the papers focus on differing age classes because with the sun they use sharp headlines, more than just one font and also very large images. I believe they target these articles to people below the age of 40. With the Times, they use long sentences as titles, a very large amount of text which is very small and covers a great deal of space, and also do not have many images even though on the page I analyzed a photo of Hillary Clinton was used I'm guessing to pull in an audience.



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