Newspapers and Magazines

Session 9: Newspapers & Magazines

In the previous lecture we found that the film Quadrophenia is about Media construction and representation of events of the 1960’s, primarily through newspapers. This lecture showed how the media still plays a large part in modern popular culture.

In recent times there has been a dramatic change in the focus and style newspapers are presented. During the 1830’s-1850’s newspapers contained just text and no pictures. All headlines were of a serious tone and certain papers were targeted at certain audiences. Plus they were often written in small concentrated. However in contrast, today’s newspapers often contain large colour pictures with small text and tend to centre on more trivial topics such as popular TV show ‘The X Factor’. Such a focus has also found people questioning some newspapers priorities.

One such newspaper is ‘The Sun’ which contains serious stories but with a more relaxed and joke-like attitude. The ‘demotic’ tone used in this paper can be related to ‘the voice of the people’, which in order to appeal to the mass amount of people means prioritising shallow news over serious news.

In more recent times newspapers and magazines have become more of a commodity, which for some have taken on an entertainment stance in order to sell more. This is the commercialisation and commodification of the media. In 1896 the Daily Mail newspaper was founded and was designed to be “a compact reader friendly newspaper” aimed at the lower middle class.

Overall, the newspapers have lost their original aim – to tell the news. Many are now a commodity companies sell to certain groups to make money.