My Newspaper

My local newspaper is aimed at the middle class to upper class citizens of the Dengie it is important that the newspaper represents its target audience. My newspaper is unconventional in the sense that it is a broadsheet local newspaper which is uncommon as usually all local newspapers are tabloid in style and genre for example The Metro and The Echo.

As my newspaper is a local newspaper the cultural codes and conventions are only relevant to the people of the Dengie as it is representing these people.

The writer reader relationship or use synthetic personalisation is important as the reader must believe that the writer has knowledge of the local area and understands what is important to the people of the area. This is especially true for a local newspaper as the audience will buy this newspaper as they want to know about the local area and what is happening in it. Newspapers need to appeal to a large audience some newspapers however appeal more to males than females such as, The Sun which uses gendered speech, has page 3 and has a large sports pull out every Monday that takes up most of the newspaper. My local newspaper I feel appeals to both sexes equally I have used neutral colours combined with black and white to ensure it is aesthetically pleasing to both genders.

On evaluation, If I was to do this project again I think I would create sections of the paper for men and women. The Sun and The Times both have sections for women, including style fashion and diet.

Representation of an audience is a difficult process for producers and editors. Many companies are taken to court over the way they represent people in the media. The chomsky propaganda model argues that five filters affect the way media is represented

1. Finance
2. Ownership
3. Flak
4. Anti-ideologies
   
5. Sources

All the content in my newspaper has not passed through any filters which is similar to all local newspapers as they do not have the budget that national newspapers have that they achieve through their advertising. Local newspapers have to source all the content themselves they cannot afford Reuters to provide them with the information needed for stories. This means that the news has gone through less filters than national newspapers.

Todorov theorizes that all narrative structures have an equilibrium which has a disruption which then resolves back to an equilibrium or a new equilibrium, however newspaper stories are usually open ended in narrative. For example in my newspaper the story concerning the nuclear power plant is an ongoing open ended narrative so this theory does not apply always to newspapers

Todorov – equilibrium through a disruption to a new equilibrium, however newspaper does not always have an ending as it’s an open ended narrative.