Introduction to Journalism

School of Communication Arts & Science

Prof. Jaewon Joo

Tabloid Broadsheet

Mix fact and emotion More fact than emotion

Shorter sentences Longer sentences

Use biased and emotional language Unbiased and clear language

Stories are mixed together Divided into clear sections

Less complex vocabulary Complicated Vocabulary

Focus on famous people, private lives and scandals Focus on major national and international events

TabloidVs.broadsheet

Tabloids

One tabloid, two truth…

Angry Liverpool fans in Wembley protest at Sun as Sunday edition comes out

Tabloid

Tabloid newspapers frequently invent stories for the entertainment of their readers, or run with what might charitably be described as fanciful headlines.

Tabloid

Silvio Berlusconi Rupert Murdoch

Press freedomOrMonopoly?

• The Sun first appeared in 1964, as a re-branded version of the trade unions’Daily Herald

• Murdoch told staff that he wanted the Sun to focus upon ‘sex, sport and contests.’ One of its trade marks would be the ‘page 3 girl’ – a daily photograph of a naked woman.

Press freedomOrMonopoly?

Gotcha Journalism

• The Sun’s famous headline “gotcha” over the story of an Argentinian warship attacked by a British submarine resonated,

• The American Civil War had a profound effect on American journalism. Large newspapers hired war correspondents to cover the battlefields, with more freedom than correspondents today enjoy. These reporters used the new telegraph and expanding railways to move news reports faster to their newspapers.

• The Associated Press received the first cable transmission ever of European news through the trans-Atlantic cable in 1858.

New forms of Journalism

• James Bennett's Herald, for example, didn't just write about the disappearance of David Livingstone in Africa; they sent Henry Stanley to find him, which he did, in Uganda. The success of Stanley's stories prompted Bennett to hire more of what would turn out to be investigative journalists.

• The New York Sun developed the idea of the human interest story and a better definition of news value, including uniqueness of a story.

New forms of Journalism

• William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer both owned newspaper chains in the American West, and both established papers in New York City: Hearst's New York Journal in 1883 and Pulitzer's New York World in 1896.

“Yellow Journalism” vs. “Muckraking Journalism”

Era of Hearst and Pulitzer

• In terms of trust, journalists rank alongside the politicians they have helped drag down.

• ‘The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment, prevent nuclear proliferation, force crooked politicians out of office, reduce poverty, provide quality health care for all people and even to save the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead, we are using it to promote sex, violence, and sensationalism and to line the pockets of already wealthy media moguls.’

- Dr. Carl Jensen

• The very fact that journalists all over the world so casually add the suffix ‘gate’ to any potential scandal, however trivial, itself indicates a certain loss of seriousness since the days of Watergate.

The crisis of Trust

Even bombsCan Bore

British newspapers didn’t regard the event as a ‘clear the front page’ story: they felt that, even in a war, readers would still want a range of softer items, in the case of the Guardian, newspaper of the year, items on fertility treatment and romantic intrigue.