Comparing Newspapers

Comparing Newspapers

The data we have been asked to collect is known as Primary Data. This

is because we ourselves have to abstract various pieces of information

from newspapers provided by our teacher. These newspapers are; ‘The

Times,’ ‘The Daily Mail’ and ‘The Daily Mirror.’ We then have the

opportunity to carry out our investigations to try and prove our own

hypothesis.

To make certain that collecting the data is unbiased IÂ’ve decided to

select three completely different sections from each article. However,

each section has identical number of lines and this is my contribution

to making the investigation fair and balanced. (If I selected any

numbers of lines from each article then I wouldnÂ’t be able to observe

the variations between the word lengths from each individual paper.)

From these different sections in each article, IÂ’m going to calculate

the length of each word and work out an approximate average, (Mean,)

for each section. The results will hopefully show, which newspaper I

have taken the sample from, (I.e. The longer the word length, the more

sophisticated the paper.) However, if this plan fails then I can

observe and investigate the proportionality of the page contained by

pictures. IÂ’m mainly going to concentrate upon the sport pictures from

each newspaper and this will hopefully confirm the type of newspaper,

(i.e. Tabloid or Broadsheet) IÂ’ve taken the picture from. (This should

illustrate the space surrounded by pictures within a certain article.)

The results should show that the MORE space contained by pictures, the

LESS mature the paper will be.

Hopefully, this will help prove my hypothesis and if one strategy

fails then I can always rely on the other.

Showing the Data.

To make the data as coherent as possible IÂ’m going to represent it in

tables. The table will be divided into four columns with suitable,

understandable titles. Below is an example of how my tables will

hopefully be set out.

Length of Words (x)

Tally

Frequency (f)

Number of Letters (fx)