News Case Study

The Daily Mail

Summary of the history of the paper?

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper founded in 1896, published in London. As of 2020 it was the highest paid circulation newspaper in the UK.

Who are the owners & what funding models are used?

The owners of the daily mail are DMG Media and The Rothermere family

What are the circulation figures?

The circulation figures for the daily mail are an average of 797,704 copies a day

What are the advertising costs?

The advertising costs for the daily mail are anywhere from £3000 to £3,000,000

What are the sales figures for the last five years?

What changes have there been in the last 10 years?

For the daily mail there have been a lot of changes for example the big move over to online news has heavily effected the news paper circulation in the past 10 years and it is slowly decreasing as more and more online news becomes freely available and newspapers become less popular

The Guardian

Summary of the history of the paper?

Who are the owners & what funding models are used?

The Scott's trust are the owners of the guardian and therefore that is the funding model used

What are the circulation figures?

The circulation figures for the Guardian are an average of 105,134 copies daily

What are the advertising costs?

The advertising costs for the guardian are around £5000 to £30,000 which is a lot less than the daily mail as they have a much less circulation.

What are the sales figures for the last five years?

What changes have there been in the last 10 years?

The big changes similarly to the daily mail in the past 10 years have been the introduction of online news and therefore less sales and circulation of paper news, this has also made it cheaper for the guardian and the daily mail to make their news but with that also makes it more difficult for them to profit off of it

Audience

The Guardian

Demographic - 50% of the demographic is female with an average age of 55+. 75% of the audience are readers in class A,B,C with no specification to one being a more majority. Average income of £28,000

Psychometrics - Explorers, Reformers & Succeeders

Hobbies/interests - Progressives are are interested in culture travel and embrace technology and change.

Issues they'd be aware of - The guardian tends to cover more hard news as opposed to soft news

What they do with their disposable income -

How they access media -

Films/Docs/Magazines/Music/Sites they like -

Types of stories that would appeal to them

The Daily Mail

Demographic - Survey in 2014 recorded that the average reader was 59 years old, women make up the majority of readers (59%) 62% of the readers are in class A,B,C1 while most being C1. The majority of these people live in the south east.the average savings for the daily mails demographic is £39,000

Psychometrics - Mainstreamers, resigned and succeeders.

Hobbies/interests -

Issues they'd be aware of -

What they do with their disposable income -

How they access media -

Films/Docs/Magazines/Music/Sites they like -

Types of stories that would appeal to them

Sensationalised personal emotive journalism -

'Will slash migration by 300,000'

Negative representations of minority groups, or absence of these groups -

No representation of any ethnic minority groups

Positive representations of the dominant group -

Positive representations of traditional family values -

'My mum sent me to school without being potty trained' demonises the idea of traditional family values and the order in which you should raise your children

Positive representations of British culture -

Positive representations of right-wing political ideology -

Positive representations of the conservative party -

The events, issues, individuals and social groups are represented on this specific cover are very much constructed to cater towards the dominant group, for example we see representations of middle class in our daily mail newspaper above as we are given one image which showcases a women at the fashion awards so it is safe to say that she is in the middle class range and although we don't see any representation of the working class we can see adverts at the top of the page which are most likely put there to target our working class, for example the quote 'Is this the reason some women are pair-shaped' obviously promoting some sort of product that only working class individuals would be interested in but also makes them look bad and inferior compared to the more specific dominant group.

April 18th Covers

In this cover of the daily mail we can see that they are definitely a right wing cover showing their support for the tories in big headline 'Tories trail labour'. This cover line also, while uplifting right wing politics, diminishes the left wing by the use of the word even after the ellipsis. This is showing us that the daily mail are 'self-aware' about Brexit and suggesting that even the tories have an upper hand on that. As for the name of the daily mail itself that shows us that they deliver the news (mail) everyday (daily) they would have used the word mail years ago when it would have been mail to receive a physical newspaper but as we know with the proliferation of technology this has made the idea of having a physical newspaper very outdated. We can also see its age from the symbol in between the two words on the headline which shows us an image of a lion and a horse, two symbolic animals for Britain holding a shield like shape with the England flag on it wearing a crown, this symbol suggests masses of patriotism just from a small logo on the masthead. The layout of the cover suggests that it is a hybrid newspaper we can tell this by looking at certain aspects, for example the use of imagery on front page, traditionally in our standard broadsheet newspaper you may have one image with a very large body of text and a much smaller headline, also a lack of colour in the pages. But this cover is not a tabloid as it does not meet all the requirements for that either therefore it must be a hybrid cover. You can bring in media theory to this as we can look at Van Zoonens theory on feminism and how in this cover there is a very big lack of anything other than the dominant group including female representations.

This cover of the guardian shows us that it is again similarly to the daily mail a hybrid newspaper, we know this primarily form the layout and the masthead for the Guardian covers that is plastered all over. The layout suggest to us an audience that it is a mix of a tabloid newspaper and a broadsheet but possibly more leaning towards the broadsheet due to the large body of text and minimalist photos. We can see from the masthead that it also has signs of a tabloid because of the large block of colour behind it, usually red it is very common piece of media language to have in a tabloid newspaper

April 20th Covers