Read All About It: Tabloids vs. Broadsheets

Read All About It: Tabloids vs. Broadsheets

I have chosen to compare a tabloid, which is a

light-hearted gossip newspaper with more celebrity banter than factual

information, with a broadsheet, which contains lots of information

that concerns our every day lives and less gossip, it can be described

as a more ‘mature’ newspaper. Broadsheets are normally printed in

black and white whereas tabloids are printed in colour. The two

newspapers are very different and there is a big boundary between fact

and fiction, which separates the two. For my coursework I have decided

to use the ‘mirror; as my tabloid and the ‘times’ as my broadsheet. I

have chosen these because in themselves they are very different and it

will be very interesting to see how they both compare mathematically.

From my tests I hope to find out how the lengths of words and

sentences both compare and also how different the language is that

they both use. I predict the language each paper uses will be very

different as each paper has a different purpose, for example, a

broadsheet is designed to inform whereas a tabloid is designed to

entertain. I also believe that there will be longer words in a

broadsheet when compared to a tabloid because of this, which brings me

onto my hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1.

My first hypothesis is that the average word length in a broadsheet

will be longer than in a tabloid, this is because a broadsheet is

intended for a more educated audience who want to be informed about

the daily issues therefore they would be more impressed with the use

of long, complex words, whereas the audience a Tabloid is designed for

would be more impressed with the quality of the information rather

than the way in which it is presented.

Hypothesis 2

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My second hypothesis is that the average sentence length in a

broadsheet will be longer than in a tabloid, I believe this because

the most complicated information would be found in the broadsheet and